Water hazards: Flooding swamps golf courses across southeast Wisconsin

RICHFIELD, Wis. (CBS 58) -- Golfers around the Milwaukee area will have to swap their clubs for kayaks at least for a little while.

Recent flooding has left parts of a popular Richfield course underwater.

While cleanup crews are making progress, it could be weeks before holes are back in play.

"We have people that have worked here for 25 years and have never seen anything like this before," said Nick Tarasoff, PGA director of golf at Kettle Hills Golf Course.

In Richfield, this nearly 40-year-old course is under several feet of water.

"This floods occasionally, but we've never had it six-feet deep, which is about what is it out there," said Tarasoff.

A typical golf course has 18 holes, but Kettle Hills is known for its unique 45 holes, which is making the cleanup effort even harder.

CBS 58 hopped on a golf cart to check out the damage on the back nine.

"The only thing you could see was flag sticks, that means the whole thing was under water," Tarasoff explained.

As crews work to pump as much water out as possible, the next challenge will be redoing the nearly 80 bunkers throughout the course.

"We have a lot of bunkers out here, as you can see -- all the sand has washed away. Each bunker, one of this size, is about four to five hours of work," said Tarasoff.

While Kettle Hills and dozens of other golf courses around the Milwaukee area are struggling with the flood, at Zablocki, where they got over seven inches of rain, the damage didn't keep golfers off the course.

"The synthetic areas are in good shape. It's a little hard to navigate between those surfaces, just with the historic amount of rainfall we had," said Andy Gieryn, golf services manager at Milwaukee County Parks.

Zablocki replaced all the tees and greens with turf in the spring of 2024.

"The drainage is a little better than what we had with the natural grass," said Gieryn.

While it's still playable, the flood caused possible long-term damage.

"Potentially replacing large areas of turf, fairways and greens, just depends on which parts of the course is affected," said Gieryn.

At Kettle Hills, some holes will be ready for play in a week, while others could take up to a month.

"We really don't have anywhere for it to go down there, nowhere to pump it to, so that's going to be weeks -- I'd say three to four weeks --  and at that point, you just hope the grass doesn't totally just die," said Tarasoff.