The biggest key to great drainage is routing. Pipe should be a last resort. But it seems people so often associate drainage to pipe. for example grassy hollows with an open side drain much better than hollows with catch basins...I did a course in ATL a few years back where the cost of pipe was Hancor HDP pipe was over 2 mill before labor. The owner had pissed off an inspector and each hole had to be able to measure runoff into the lake. No water could move from fairway to fairway and it did not begin this way. "Divot gathering" areas are a huge problem but it drains...and I now despise pipe..JMO
Mike,
Yes, older routings tend to place fairways in high spots, while housing courses and some architects - Think Tom Fazio, for example - like to place fairways in valleys to make them more defined, comfortable, containing, etc., which then require more drainage, especially if considering housing runoff that won't likely occur for 15-20 years.
I have never done a job with $2Mil in drainage materials, which would translate to $4 Mil in installation costs, but some wonder why a course I built in the desert of LV required $600K in drainage (in 1994 dollars, which would translate to $1.2M or so now) but it was to control future housing drainage. Or, at Colbert Hills, where the back nine still hasn't had the housing built. You stand on the 16th tee and you can see that valley fw drain empty into a small catchment area, and it is 48", which seems extreme for the moment, but may be necessary some day.
Would love to hear the backstory on pissing off an inspector! Obviously the owner didn't have your southern charm. Usually, in reasonable areas of the country (i.e., not California and a few other states) I have found the on the ground regulators to be fair, at least until you cross them.
I have had to measure and drain each watershed. One of the problems - not enforced as much as during the height of the golf and environment era - was that environmental regulators decided that it was necessary to NOT let water drain to streams without a filter, as water quality became equal to water quantity in drainage design (in their eyes) So, yeah, that takes a lot of grading and drain pipes to make sure you direct water where it doesn't want to go. For a while, regulators had no problems adding a million in cost to golf course construction. That would be okay, but somehow, when the same agency built a road or whatever, they often found it easy to exempt themselves from their regulations in the name of the public interest.
So, yeah, lots of courses had lots of drainage that probably didn't need to be there strictly from a golf perspective. Some of it did, though. Have told the story but send some of my non golf draftsmen to the Cornish-Graves Golf Design Seminar about 1990. Geoff C commented that the average drainage budget was $50K. My guy told him ours was triple that, and Geoff admitted that he put in the minimum, but after 3-5 years, that is what probably needed to be spent. When budgets were decent, I figured "why wait and leave the first super with a problem?"
As one agronomist says, supers don't add drainage every year, just the years they work there. And as noted, they often don't have the capabilities to do it as well as the contractors with bigger equipment.