silt dumped by a raging Swannanoa River.
By Trent Bouts
It was almost a week and a half after Hurricane Helene before Peter Dejak set foot on Asheville Municipal Golf Course, which his company,
Golf Partners, began managing two years earlier. As he took in the scene, FEMA workers and cadaver dogs painstakingly worked their way across the front nine buried by silt, in parts up to three feet deep.
Such was the devastation, with longstanding landmarks gone or unrecognizable. Dejak found himself asking, “What am I looking at? I didn’t know whether I was facing north or south,” he says. Even now, a full five months on, no one at “The Muni” really knows which way is up.
At issue is if, and when, FEMA funds will arrive allowing a complete rebuild of the front nine, which remains closed. Adding to the uncertainty is whether the city of Asheville will extend its own emergency funding to keep the elevated back nine, which suffered only tree loss, open in the meantime. An initial round of up to $250,000 to cover operational shortfalls expires at the end of March.
“The good thing is that everybody seems to understand the importance of the golf course historically, and its place in the community,” Dejak says. “It’s more than just a regular golf course.”
Designed by Donald Ross, when The Muni opened in 1927 it was the first municipal golf course in the state, later becoming the first racially integrated municipal course in the Southeast. Since 1959, it has hosted the SkyView Open, still one of the largest African American-operated tournaments in the country. In its own way, as a 2020 documentary by local filmmaker Paul Bonesteel portrayed, The Muni is a bit of a big deal.
Of course, an exponentially bigger deal was the loss of 106 lives in the state, and more than 100,000 homes destroyed or damaged during Helene. Against that backdrop, the fate of any golf course pales by comparison.
Even so, The Muni was one of dozens of courses across the foothills and mountains of Western North Carolina severely impacted by the storm. They may be recreation facilities, but each is an employer as well as a social hub, and at each, an economic and emotional
toll has been exacted.
One golf course superintendent in the area admits to grappling with “survivor guilt.” He declined a phone interview but was poignant in a text: “A golf course and its infrastructure can be replaced — lives and generational property cannot. In this grand scheme of chaos, so many people lost things more precious and valuable…”
On top of the mountain Linville Ridge Country Club, the highest course east of the Mississippi, took the worst of the wind damage. There, development and operations director Steve Sheets put tree loss across the private development in the in the order of 10,000. So many fell on some homes, “you couldn’t even tell there was a house in there,” he says.
The public Sugar Mountain Golf Course in Banner Elk is one among a host of courses that will limp into the coming spring season. The course plans to reopen with a composite nine of its least affected holes mid-April, while the rest are repaired, with a tentative completion date mid-summer. The total repair bill, including reconstruction of 32 bunkers, the 16th green and significant tracts of cart paths, is expected to exceed $1.5 million.
Others, working to restore everything from greens to bridges, irrigation pumps and more, will take longer. Hound Ears Club in Boone is reclaiming significant portions of several holes that washed away and instead became a dumping ground for everything from propane tanks to RV campers.
Coming up with the money for the work is one thing. As Dejak says, “I don’t think anybody has had real success with FEMA so far. Some have gone to their insurance companies trying to get what they can, but most don’t have a lot of coverage for what was primarily flood damage. Most of the coverage involved was just for tree damage.”
Compounding the challenge is that, since the pandemic, play has gone through the roof, boosting demand for labor, services and equipment. To help those who needed it most, that meant, suspending the normal order of things and “Doing some things out of the box, just to get people to where they could function,” says Brent Miller, sales manager with Smith Turf & Irrigation, a Charlotte-based Toro distributor.
At a handful of courses, like Broadmoor Golf Links near Asheville Airport, Black Mountain Golf Club 30 minutes east and Mt. Mitchell Golf Club near Burnsville, the questions
are existential.
The vast majority of employees who work at the region’s golf courses affected by the hurricane also live in communities that suffered extensive losses. Few could really clock off at the end of any day and the reality is that repairs will likely be done before the healing.
At least there was one step in the latter direction at Asheville Muni in February. The Army Corps of Engineers finally cleared the front nine of debris and, to be rid of hazardous contaminants, the top six inches of topsoil. It still doesn’t look like anything Dejak knew, but there is consolation in that it is no longer the same landscape where those cadaver dogs made several finds.
If, like Asheville Muni, the future of some mountain courses remains clouded and perhaps dependent on conversations with FEMA, there is little encouragement in the agency’s own data. Those numbers show that 43% of disaster-hit small businesses never reopen. Another 29% close shop within two years. ■