Flood damage at Coal Creek Golf Course 35 to 40 bunkers washed out 14 greens damaged 13 to 14 tee boxes damaged 25 acres of fairways impacted 3 bridges destroyed 1 underpass impassable If you go What: Volunteer to help clean up Coal Creek Golf Course When: 9 a.m. Tuesday; 9 a.m. Oct. 5 Where: Coal Creek Golf Course Club House, 585 W. Dillon Road

LOUISVILLE — More than 30 bunkers are washed out and fairways are strewn with river rocks. Tee boxes are slick with mud, bridges destroyed, paths impassable.

The back five holes of Coal Creek Golf Course are sequestered from the first 13 by a flooded pedestrian tunnel under Dillon Road. Fourteen of the course’s 18 greens are damaged, with the 10th hole looking like it was bombed at the edges.

“I feel like we need four-wheel-drive carts out here now,” Joe Stevens, Louisville Parks and Recreation director, said Friday, as he drove through Coal Creek Golf Course a little more than two weeks after it was slammed by historic flooding in Boulder County. “When Coal Creek rose up, it just took the rock from the riverbed and deposited it on the golf course. We got it everywhere.”

Besides what got battered on the surface of the course, the irrigation system — already aging and in need of refurbishment — got “fried” by standing water, with a $30,000 booster pump junked by the storm, Stevens said. Coal Creek itself formed new channels as it spilled over its banks, leaving behind shredded turf and fallen trees on the 23-year-old city-owned course.

“I don’t know if you can drive a stake into the heart of the golf course, but the storm brought our operations to a screeching halt,” Stevens said. “There is the potential to lose a season here.”

But the parks director is looking for glimmers of hope in a rotten situation: The driving range should re-open next week, two upcoming volunteer cleanup efforts will help remove the limbs and rocks that litter the course, and money from the Federal Emergency Management Agency could go a long way toward covering the tab for repairs, which according to an early estimate exceed $3.5 million.

Already a golf course design architect is doing a damage assessment of the course, hole by hole. Crews were out Friday with heavy machinery, starting the daunting job of moving the tons of rock and dirt deposited on the course by a raging Coal Creek. Stevens met with officials from FEMA on Friday to talk money.

The road ahead, he said, is long but not endless.

“It gives us the chance to do a major renovation of the entire course,” Stevens said. “We have one chance to do this right if we want to rehabilitate it.”

Funding sources in question

Ken Gambon, chairman of the Louisville Golf Course Advisory Board, also sees opportunity in tragedy. The city had already embarked on a six-year, $5 million golf course improvement initiative, and some of the elements wrecked by the storm were due for replacement or repair, including many of the bunkers, the irrigation system and the fairways.

“When Coal Creek comes back, it will come back better than ever,” he said. “It is our opportunity to fix things that need to be fixed.”

But the path getting there will be as precarious as some of the muck-strewn paths that now wind their way around Coal Creek Golf Course. Gambon worries about obtaining the necessary funding in light of other flood damages Louisville experienced, including multiple water main breaks and the collapse of a critical road bridge south of downtown.

While FEMA may pony up 75 percent of the cost of getting Coal Creek Golf Course back up to snuff, and insurance may defray some of the cost as well, Gambon doesn’t know how high a priority the golf course will be for the city.

“I’m very worried because there are so many demands on resources in Louisville,” he said.

There is also the matter of golfers who have paid their annual dues who won’t be able to use the course for at least half a year, if not longer. Gambon said he has been getting calls about whether the course plans to refund those dues. So far those questions have not been answered.

Eric Jensen, general manager of the golf course, said the near-term future is a bit uncertain. The clubhouse continues to serve light snacks and beverages to those willing to come out and visit, and the pro shop still has inventory for sale.

But Western Golf Properties, which pays the city $180,000 annually to operate the course, will need to quickly figure out how to start generating revenues again. About 38,000 rounds of golf are played at Coal Creek annually, bringing in about $1.8 million a year for Western.

“We are here operating, partnering with the city; we are mowing,” Jensen said. “We’re managing the best we can.”

‘Short-term inconvenience’

Already, Stevens said, there is light at the end of the tunnel. The University of Colorado’s Pac-12 Cross Country Championships will still take place at Coal Creek Golf Course on Nov. 2. The course was modified to take athletes out of harm’s way, and the event should help give a boost to a flood-weary area, he said.

“Hotels within Louisville are booked and CU wants to be there … and we want them too,” Stevens wrote in an email to the city manager’s office earlier this week. “This event will go a long ways toward demonstrating that Coal Creek is committed to serving the community and draws attention to this course as a key quality of life component for our city and our region.”

But the cruel irony of a clubhouse, which just reopened in June after undergoing a $250,000 renovation, now sitting empty and unused is not lost on Stevens. The flooding’s impact is painfully real, but it will not bring to an end one of Louisville’s greatest assets, he said.

“It is something that is going to create some major short-term inconvenience for golfers, and it’s going to cause problems for homeowners who bought homes on the golf course,” he said. “But in the long term, Coal Creek Golf Course will come back even better.”