10/15/2019 8:10 AM
Hello everyone. I took over this course 5 weeks ago and along with the course is a 100 acre city park. This means we have a lot of visitors to the park which surrounds the golf course. A park visitor saw a lot of algae covering the lagoon of the park and then saw us irrigating the golf course which just happens to allow overspray onto the jogging path. they instantly decided that this water was coming from the lagoon and we were putting HAB's (harmful algae bloom toxins) into the air. they sent a letter to the city claiming this which instantly put us into testing mode. my irrigation system was tested at 8.05 parts per billion at the sprinkler head and the pond tested at 689ppb, where acceptable range was 8.0 ppb. I was told to stop using our irrigation system completely. We then used our bad water from our well to fill the ponds and flush the ponds and was able to get our new test down with the irrigation water at 2.5 and the pond down to 27. but that was still not good enough. I am again flushing my ponds with the bad water (very high on salts)and will retest today).
Here is where I need help, does anyone have experience with HAB's in general?
Has anyone's irrigation system ever been shut down due to HAB's?
Does anyone know a top pond educator who may help me gather information about the cycles of these bacteria.
I have already been doing a lot of online research, which has given me a good idea of what I am dealing with. I plan on recommending fountains and bubblers to be installed into our ponds since we already have those in our lagoon in the park (did not do a very good job there though).
Since I am new here I do not know what the past practices were for the leaves from all of our trees. I think the last guy did not have to park to deal with also so I will need to build a complete plan for these ponds going into next year. I was hoping to get a lot of information at the GIS this next year.
Any ideas will be appreciated.
Thanks
Randy Smith GCS