Golf Courses Are Turning to Reclaimed Water as Drought Continues : Conservation: Links and resorts know that high-tech irrigation and reclaimed water are their only alternatives with restrictions on potable water looming.

In Bill Nolde’s grim vision of the golf course of horrors, tiny patches of green are surrounded by a forbidding, baked wasteland.

Golfers trudge past cactus and brittle sagebrush toward the next tee.

Any ball sliced into the vast sandy rough might as well be lost in infinite space, rolling forever.

The greens seem so tiny and distant that it is commonly called “target golf,” and, although such courses really exist in parched Arizona, Nolde is striving to make sure nothing remotely like them comes to drought-stricken San Diego County.

“In the desert, about any time of year you’re looking at brown dirt rather than green grass,” said Nolde. “Most people like the verdant green vistas to play on.”

As at the lush Rancho Bernardo Golf Course, where Nolde is the superintendent, and where he is leading a drive, pardon the pun, for the county’s 72 golf courses to use reclaimed water.

Nolde and an increasing number of golf course superintendents here are reasoning that it is better to switch to reclaimed water than risk having water officials impose restrictions that could turn the courses into sunburned badlands.

That’s a significant change in thinking by people with power over 10,000 acres of golf course countywide, where one acre of Bermuda grass typically sops up 815,000 gallons of water a year.

The golf course supervisors’ new-found fervor for reclaimed water and use of high-technology irrigation methods has impressed water officials like Peter MacLaggan, head of reclaimed water for the San Diego County Water Authority.

“There isn’t one of them out there who wouldn’t eagerly convert,” said MacLaggan. “There’s a real commitment there. They see the handwriting on the wall.”

Nolde saw the handwriting, all right.

About 18 months ago, when the drought was in its third year, Nolde realized that, if superintendents didn’t act, courses would be vulnerable to rushed and perhaps ill-conceived water conservation measures.

He formed the San Diego Golf Course Water Conservation Group, representing about 40% of the county’s courses, which met with county water officials in what Nolde called a “preemptive approach” to mandatory water savings.

The group convinced officials to exempt sensitive golf course greens, which make up 2% of a course’s total acreage, from water conservation. Supervisors argued that greens must have good-quality potable water because salty reclaimed water would destroy them.

But, in return for the exemption, the group promised water officials to use reclaimed water when possible. Nolde’s group also emphasizes improving golf-course irrigation systems.

“That’s the wave of the future,” said Harold Vaubel, superintendent of the La Costa Hotel and Spa golf course that has hosted the PGA Tournament of Champions for 15 years.

His course now uses 850 acre-feet of potable water annually, but is installing a system to bring 750 acre-feet of substitute reclaimed water to the entire 36-hole, 300-acre course in about a year. “It’s going to be a necessity for golf courses,” said Vaubel.

(An acre-foot equals 325,900 gallons of water, or enough to fulfill all the needs of a family of four for two years.)

But going to reclaimed water isn’t that easy for everybody, not yet.

MacLaggon said of the county’s 72 courses, 39 use undrinkable ground water such as urban runoff. Two are going directly to reclaimed water, and the rest get municipal water and “are our primary targets to get them reclaimed water” by 1998, he said.

The authority is working with water suppliers to build pipelines in order that reclaimed water can be shipped to golf courses and other users. According to the authority, the county will use more than 100,000 acre-feet of reclaimed water annually by year 2010.

But Nolde’s group is also worried about the public’s perception that golf courses are slurping enormous quantities of water while homeowners carry the brunt of conservation.

“There are a lot of people who are not sympathetic to golf courses,” said George Loveland, director of the San Diego Park and Recreation Department, which owns Torrey Pines, Balboa Park and Mission Bay Park golf courses.

By the mid ‘90s, reclaimed water will be used at all three courses, a fact that comforts Loveland, because courses relying on regular water supplies are especially vulnerable in dry years.

“In times of drought, the things that will be shut off first are parks and golf courses,” he said.

Nolde is aware that the public assumes that golf courses are water wasters, yet he insists that, just because the sprinklers are shooting jets of water, doesn’t mean the resource is being wantonly sprayed away.

“We are large users of water, but we’re not stupid, we’re in business,” he said.

Water is too expensive to waste, and courses shouldn’t be over-watered, he said. Besides, “golf courses can’t hide. Water districts know where they all are and monitor use of potable water,” said Nolde.

In fact, golf courses have gotten high marks for efficient water use from Margarita Engle of the Resource Conservation District.

She measures how much water golf courses sprinkle on their turf, and the 20 courses that volunteered to be monitored by the district have averaged 82% irrigation efficiency. “That’s very good,” said Engle, who found that large residential landscaping projects average less than 50%.

Credit for precision watering goes mainly to high-technology computerized irrigation.

“We’d like people to know we’re an integral part of the tourist industry,” said Nolde. “The way we irrigate is state-of-the-art.”

The 18-hole, 162-acre EastLake Greens golf course being developed in Chula Vista is an example of modern course technology.

It will employ a computerized water distribution system that includes a $5,000 weather station with antennas and dishes that read the wind direction, solar radiation and humidity to figure how much water the grass needs.

“This grass is in a life-or-death situation every day,” said superintendent Mike Swing. “You lose turf and you lose business.”