Video: Golf Club Sucks Mud Through a Bladder

If you drove down Sakonnet Point Road this week and passed the , you may have seen a weird-looking enormous grey bag across the street near the pond. If you stopped and rolled down your window, you probably heard a loud droning noise of a running pump connected to the bag and the pond.

According to the club’s superintendent, Kirk A. Whiting, they use the pond to pump water into their irrigation system. The water is transported to more than 500 valves to water the golf course.

Whiting said that since they dug out the pond in 1986, it’s accumulated one to two feet of silt and muck at the bottom.

“We started getting a lot of silt into the irrigation system,” he said. “We’re taking this muck into our pumping system, but this muck is being pushed out. It’s a maintenance issue.”

Whiting said they asked the Coastal Management Resource Council about dredging the pond, but the agency expressed concern about the impact to adjacent wetlands and where they would put water.

“We took a look at our options,” he said.

Whiting called Illinois-based U.S. Aqua Vac, a nationwide lake and pond cleaning service. They have been onsite all week filtering muck from the pond water across the street from the golf course.

“It’s the best way of doing it without harming the environment in any way,” said Whiting. “The silt and sludge is contained in the bag once it’s finished.”

Removing the muck is about a two-week process, he added, and to de-water the pond, it will take one to three months.

After the water is deemed free of silt, Whiting said, they will be able use the leftover silt as a fertile mix of soil. “We get good fill for future projects,” he said.

Aqua Vac supervisor Ryan Carrico said the giant 60-foot, by 100-foot bag next to the pond is porous, like a giant coffee filter.

“It holds in the mud,” he said.

Carrico had two other employees on site on Wednesday, one of them a diver underwater holding a six-inch hose at the bottom of the pond scooping the mud into the filter. The mud traveled through the filter to a pump on land, then to the muck bag, or as Carrico called it, mud bladder.

“This is really silty mud,” he added.

Carrico said they will be traveling to New Hampshire after the job is finished in Little Compton.