Storms do number on ASA diamonds

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By Barb Ickes | Saturday, July 26, 2008 7:03 PM CDT | () comments

The visitors will have no idea what hit us.

When Moline Parks Director Milt Hand watched Monday morning’s storm roll in over his cup of morning coffee, he had one thought: “This can’t be good.”

And it wasn’t.

The Greenvalley Sports Complex was directly in the path of the straight-line winds that wreaked havoc across the Quad-Cities early Monday. The complex would not be spared, regardless of the 120 teams from around the country that were planning to play fastpitch softball on it seven days later.

“I don’t know what we did to Mother Nature, but she’s sure biting back,” city landscaper Randall Morrison said Friday. “This place was torn up. It was terrible.”

The winds took two of the giant poles that hold oversized fixtures for lighting the diamonds. It twisted eight of the nine shade umbrellas into pretzels, took down two scoreboards and six trees. And this was on top of the inch of floodwater that had to be vacuumed off the fields.

“We just haven’t been left alone all spring,” Hand said. “This park was hit with 95 mile per hour winds.”

First thing Monday morning, Hand started making phone calls. He was counting down the hours until the first pitch was thrown in the ASA Girls’ 18-and-under fastpitch national tournament Monday.

“I started asking everybody to put us first on their lists,” he said of the crews he would need for cleanup. “Our power didn’t even come back until 7 p.m. Thursday.”

Even before the storm, extra park crews had been called in to manicure the grounds to national standards. Morrison said he was notified three weeks ago that he would help lead the first teams of workers.

“They told me to make the diamonds green, which is something I can do,” he said. “But I don’t usually do it in three weeks.”

The first two weeks were work enough, he said, courtesy of the two separate floods that pushed Rock River water onto the fields. On Monday, things really picked up.

Morrison carried three sheets of legal pad paper with him Friday, each filled with to-do lists with a majority of the items crossed off. On the fields surrounding him, two softball teams worth of workers mowed, blew dirt off sidewalks, rehung lights, swept, replaced electrical panels and hosed down concrete.

“My hope is that the people who come here Sunday have no idea what happened here,” Hand said. “Of course, there’s nothing we can do about all those snapped trees on the other side of the fence.”

Barb Ickes can be contacted at (563) 383-2316 or bickes@qctimes.com.