Quadrant I

Those familiar with Stephen Covey's, The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People, will recognize these four quadrants from his time management matrix:

Ideally, with proper planning, we are able to spend most of our time working in Quadrant II, and try to avoid the "putting out fires" of Quadrant I. 

Unfortunately, even with the best planning, there are some events that are difficult to predict.  For example, when we have irrigation issues involving the main line, everything else gets placed on the back burner.  While there hasn't been much need to irrigate lately, having an entire golf hole with no water, is not ideal.

This past Wednesday afternoon, we suddenly had water flowing across the cart path at #5 green.  After doing some exploratory surgery (aka digging), we discovered that the source of this leak was a steel main line fitting on the 6" pipe.

Once the fitting was cut out, it was pretty easy to see what had happened.  These fittings are epoxy-coated during their manufacturing process, however any scratch or scrape of the paint can allow corrosion to develop.  Once a pinhole is formed, the jet of water at 120 psi will quickly cause it to expand.  You can often judge the scale of the irrigation issue by the hole required to make the repair--and this one definitely required the backhoe. 

With four of us spending the better part of the day working on this problem, we were able to get the repair taken care of from start to finish.  (Of course, it may not really be a good thing that we're becoming quite proficient in dealing with main line fitting failures.)  The lesson here is that Quadrant I is not a great place to be spending your time, but if you find yourself there, some Quadrant II pre-planning can be very helpful in extinguishing the fire.