Newberry Country Club badly damaged by wind

By Carol Stiffler

A straight-line wind hit the Newberry area Saturday afternoon, blowing along the M-28 corridor and causing devastating damage on Foley Hill and the M-123 intersection where the Newberry Country Club is located.

With an eye on the weather, club manager Linda blew the foghorn to call all golfers off the course before it started to rain.

When it hit, it had quite a force.

Within about two minutes, said club owner Lance Byrns, the wind uprooted many trees and broke many others in half. One tree fell on a power line, another hit a power pole, and a power pole on the course broke in half.

Byrns was working in the golf course shop during the storm, which sounded like simple wind and rain, and was deeply saddened by the damage to the course, which he had worked extensively on during his time as owner.

“It’s terrible,” Byrns said. “It’s hard to watch.”

Byrns immediately announced the temporary closure of the club and called in arborists to assess the damage.

“The cleanup will begin tomorrow,” he said on Saturday. “Then the time will come. It will simply take time.”

For golfers from the area and abroad, many of whom had booked tee times for July 4, it couldn’t have come at a worse time. The irony was even greater: Byrns had hired the Asplundh Tree Expert Company to do the tree work on the course.

“Asplundh has been here for a month doing cleaning work,” said Byrns.

Locals organized a volunteer work session for Monday, July 1st and did what they could to help. Golfer Kenn Depew organized a work session where youth and families helped out, including Scott and Colleen Duflo and their family.

Colleen Duflo admits she is not a golfer – yet – but she works in economic development and knows how devastating the storm is to the country club’s business.

“He’s not a customer of mine, but he’s important to our community,” Duflo said. “He’s a focal point of our community.”

Byrns was lucky in some ways that none of the trees fell on the golf course’s greens or tees, she said. “It’s a miracle nothing fell on them,” she said. “According to Lance, it would have taken years to repair them and get them back in good shape so they would be operational again. He’s very lucky – and I don’t want to downplay what happened.”

Byrns is not yet sure when the golf course can reopen.

“I have no time frame,” he said. “I can’t see beyond… that tree.”

The course is insured, including against lost income.

“It’s a pretty big deal for this small community to have something like this happen,” Byrns said. “We’ve been here 11 years and we’ve never seen anything like this.”