Messenger photo by Eric Pratt: The new irrigation pond at the Fort Dodge Country Club, located behind the No. 5 green and to the right of the No. 6 fairway, uses filtered backwash from the city rather than clean water to use on the course.

A project over a quarter century in the making finally came to fruition at the Fort Dodge Country Club this spring with the completion of an irrigation pond.

The large body of water, located behind the No. 5 green and just to the right of the No. 6 fairway, will be a new feature for players at this weekend’s Fort Dodge Amateur golf tournament. It actually serves a practical purpose, though: the pond’s content will be used to keep the course green, thanks to an amended partnership with the City of Fort Dodge.

“The conversations for this actually started in the late-1990s, when an architect suggested this as part of a master plan for the course,” FDCC Superintendent Mark Siems said. “It stayed kind of in the conceptual stage until about seven or eight years ago, when we started having more serious conversations with the city about an alternative means (of irrigation) and what that would look like.”

Using city drinking water on a golf course made less and less sense as time passed. So last fall, the city council reached a new agreement with the FDCC to send 160,000 gallons of filtered backwash every day from the John W. Pray Water Facility to the course grounds.

“Water will only continue to get scarcer,” Siems said. “This helps the city and it helps us. We are able to use the ‘leftover’ water, so to speak, and the city isn’t sending us drinking water to irrigate the turf.”

The filter backwash couldn’t be used for drinking. Before now, it had been stored in a lagoon and eventually pumped to the wastewater treatment plant.

Now, it will head to the FDCC for use through a pump station, on-site piping and the storage pond.

“We put in over 5,000 feet of water lines and 700 feet of electric line,” Siems said. “The city was responsible for over 1,000 feet of water line.”

The pond is massive. Original trench work began last October, and the project was completed in May. It holds four million gallons of water, and is 10 feet deep essentially all the way across.

“To put (the size) in perspective, you could take the dirt (removed) from endzone to endzone on a football field and it would be nine and a half feet tall all the way across,” Siems said. “This saves us over $60,000 a year in water, and the city will now be able to use the drinking water for better purposes year round.

“It’s a win-win situation.”

Under the previous arrangement, the FDCC had been using approximately 15 million gallons of drinking water annually to irrigate the course.