It’s flood season again in SW Minnesota. A town near me, Granite Falls, is looking forward to its 3rd good flood in a decade–they flood so frequently they’re not eligible for flood insurance anymore. While wondering why these morons don’t just move the town uphill, I thought:
“Jeez, didn’t they just fill 200,000 sandbags not 3 years ago?”
Which prompted the original question. After the flood waters recede, the sandbags go away, but to where? I hear no clarion call for an army of volunteers to start EMPTYING sandbags, or moving them to storage facilities. Wouldn’t it make sense (especially in chronic flood locations like GF) to just store the filled bags in a warehouse somewhere? Or leave 'em where they are, so people don’t have to take time out of their day next time to go put 'em back?
Well, this is goofy. My 99% WAG was that they empty out the sandbags and just store the empty cloth bags.
So, just for the heck of it, I put “sandbag storage” into Google and it brought me this (warning, it’s a PDF file, needs Acrobat Reader):
http://www.nv.doe.gov/news&pubs/publications/envm/datareport/attch6-1.pdf
Somebody was measuring “average millirem per year for NTS thermoluminescent dosimeters” and one of the areas they measured was over by the “Sandbag Storage Hut”. I can’t visualize a hut big enough to store the numbers of filled sandbags required to keep the Red River in its banks, so I’m assuming that my WAG is confirmed, that they empty out the sand and just store the cloth bags.
I also found a reference to “sandbag filling machines”, so it isn’t just people shoveling frantically anymore.
http://www.dscp.dla.mil/gi/general/newprod.htm
I love the Internet.
And my WAG as to why you don’t hear calls for volunteers to empty out the sandbags when the crisis is over is because it’s a heckuva lot easier and faster to dump out rather than to fill up. Even the most cretinous municipal employee can be expected to handle the task, and he won’t even have to put his cigarette down, either.
Storing the filled sandbags in a warehouse would require the services of forklifts at both ends, at 20 bucks an hour for forklift operators. It’s cheaper to dump them out and toss them in the back of a pickup truck.
And as to why they don’t just leave the filled sandbags in place down by the river is because people will steal them.
And they built their town in a flood plain, they’re surprised when it floods?
A year after the Merced flooded (it’s the river that runs through Yosemite National Park in California) you could still find piles of busted rotting sandbags and their sandy guts. I don’t remember seeing any INSIDE the park, but the “gateway” community of El Portal had 'em lots of places. These were burlap sandbags and the fabric seemed to be disintegrating very rapidly. But on the news the other evening it looked like they were using plastic sandbags in Minnesota. I would imagine that several billion plastic bags heading down the Mississippi would have deleterious effects on the ecosystem.