By CHRIS STEVENSON
As the world’s best players took to the stage Thursday at the Ottawa Hunt and Golf Club for the CP Women’s Open, it’s remarkable there was a stage at all.
Just three months ago, Hunt superintendent Eric Ruhs wondered if the biggest event in Ottawa this year could be played here.
Surveying the wreckage wrought by the storm which ripped through Ontario on May 21 — and hit the Ottawa Valley and the Hunt Club particularly hard — Ruhs wandered through the 1,100 damaged trees and wondered how the course could be made safe for the tournament.
“The first four or five days, you’re a deer in the headlights,” he said on the eve of the tournament. “You don’t know where to stop or start.”
Ruhs and his crew, along with hundreds of volunteer members, fellow superintendents from the Valley, Hamilton and Mississauga and arborists from Kingston (every other tree maintenance company in the Valley was taxed to the max) started taking stock and clearing the downed trees.
The course was closed for 16 days. Fifteen chainsaws were running non-stop for the first five days.
“The company out of Kingston basically moved in. They rolled in the 27th of May and we saw their tail lights leave a week ago Friday,” said Ruhs. “Every single tree was reviewed, some of them twice. Yeah, we’re confident that things were safe.”
In June, there was a what you could call a rootball cemetery in the area between the third fairway and Hunt Club road. Passing by at that time it was about 40 feet high and about 70 yards long.
The priority was just getting the damaged trees out of the way to allow for Golf Canada to have the space they were going to need to build the infrastructure for the tournament.
“The volume of mulch was astronomical,” said Ruhs. “Everything that could go through a tub grinder did. One particular pile was 254 feet long and 28 feet wide and that was less than half the volume that we had.
“It took a number of days with tractor trailer loads to haul that off. It all got recycled to the best of our knowledge. It was landscape repurposed and or goes to pulp and paper mills, those sorts of things.”
It’s remarkable that out of the 1,100 trees there weren’t really any that affected the strategic values of the holes for the tournament.
With so much time and energy focused on recovering from the storm damage, Ruhs said the greens crew fell about six weeks behind in their usual maintenance.
Tournament director Ryan Paul heaped praise on Ruhs and his team and the Hunt Club membership.
“You said you’re six weeks behind in cultural practices. It doesn’t look that way out there. Looks great. (You) brought it back to championship conditions like we knew you would.”
That local hero Brooke Henderson is here for another CP Women’s Open and there will be more than 70,000 people passing through the gates is a great story.
The fact that Ruhs, the Hunt and its members were able to overcome the damage of May 21 and get the stage set is an even more remarkable one.
