Augusta National Golf Club is facing months of extensive repairs after Hurricane Helene passed through the area over the weekend and left a path of destruction in its wake.

Masters chairman Fred Ridley offered his assesment of the situation at a press conference ahead of the Asia-Pacific Amateur Championship on Thursday.

“Several of our key people are not here this year and they stayed behind in Augusta to really care for our employees and the community as they recover from what was really a very catastrophic weather event or hurricane that came through Augusta and many other areas in the southeast last week,” Ridley said. “Something that I’ve really never seen in my lifetime.

“And so we are busy at Augusta. I was there the last couple of days, I was a couple days late coming here, and we are in recovery mode. We are really focusing on our employees and our neighbors, business owners at Augusta to try to help everybody get back on their feet.

Ridley noted that he’s more concerned about the surrounding community than the course itself. But we’re just over five months out from The Masters and there’s plenty of repair work to be done.

“We’ve literally had dozens of people working at the club and what’ve really been most proud of is while everyone certainly is focused on getting us back up and running, our employees have been focused on the community at large,” Ridley said.

“As far as the golf course, it really was affected just as the rest of the community was. There was a lot of damage. We have a lot of people working hard to get us back up and running. We don’t really know exactly what that’s going to mean but I can tell if you if it’s humanly possible, we’ll be back in business sooner rather than later.”

The club closed for the season in May and planned to reopen on Oct. 13. But now that date is in flux as Ridley and company asses the damage and figure out their next steps.