All up and down the Mississippi, there are reinforcing piles of sandbags. Once the water goes down, then what?? Do they get hauled back to a sand pit to wait for the next flood?
I used to do quite a bit of testing on an explosives range, where my biggest task was testing a specific brand of truck bed liner sprayed onto sandbags to improve their resistance to the sun. It’s really damaging to the burlap, especially in an arid environment. There were a great many designs tested to try and find a way for the sand to be in position the longest, while minimizing fragmentation in the case of a terrorist or military attack. Great stuff, that bed liner, they even sprayed it on CMU (concrete masonry units, aka cinderblock walls) to keep them from spalling into buildings; the liner acted as a net to keep everything together.
Back to the point; we put in a lot of effort to determine how we could get these sandbags and abuttments to last longer. It wouldn’t surprise me in the least if the sandbags were just left for the sun to do its work and let the wind and water take care of the resulting sand.
I have never heard of sandbags being reclaimed for future use. That’s not to say that they never are, I’ve just not heard of it happening. I can’t see many people taking the time, trouble and expense to do so, although it would be good if it were possible.
Many are lost as Santo Rugger suggests, I’m afraid - disintegrated so that the contents are blown/washed away.
If the sand isn’t in a place where it can be left, heavy and light equipment can easily carry it away.
I had to fill some once to help protect a Navy base from a hurricane that never actually hit shore - the bags were hauled to the corner of a parking lot and we walked past them for months.
I moved out to Salt Lake City in the summer of 1983. They built a virtual RIVER down the center of State Street, safely bringing floodwaters from City Creek Canyon to a drain a few miles away. All that water flowed between two walls of sandbags going down the middle of the street. I was impressed:
1.) It was all done by volunteer labor.
2.) After the flooding, they dismanteled it. There wasn’t even a leftovar bag left lying around.
3.) The next summer, they built it again.
I can’t say for certain, but I strongly believe that this is a case where the sandbags were taken down, emptied, and recycled the next year (at least the sand was).
They don’t reuse them after a flood. Midwestern floods usually dump a soup of raw sewage, industrial chemicals, fertilizers and who knows what else into rivers. After the floods of 1993 and 1995, emergency management agencies actually issued warnings not to save used bags.
Around here, the local news is explaining how many you can dispose of for free, and letting people know that they can keep bags as sand for wintertime only if untouched by flood waters.
There was a Slate article that said the bags tend to not hold together so well by the time it’s time to take them down, and that you can use the sand for road building and stuff but definitely not for your kid’s sandbox, because of the chemicals and such.
Portage will empty the bags and burn the sacks. The sand has lots of rocks and they plan on using it for roads in the winter. I’m hoping the prisoners that put down a lot of the bags, come and take them all away. As far as I’m concerned they can stay piled where they are all summer, if they don’t.
Man, there must be a Post staff writer on the board.
That is a cool story. Did you happen to take any pictures?
I didn’t take any pictures. This page has one:
http://historytogo.utah.gov/utah_chapters/utah_today/floods.html
Here are some others:
http://www.ci.slc.ut.us/utilities/NewsEvents/news1999/news5281999.htm
http://www.ci.slc.ut.us/Utilities/NewsEvents/news2000/news03142000.htm
(third picture in that last one)
Thanks for the links Cal. Bookmarked for later!
I hadn’t thought about how nasty the bags must become - just one more stinky thing in an area full of stinky things.
Thanks for all the replies - I feel enlightened.
They are carefully taken to open fields where the excess mud and silt from the flood is taken. There, they are planted in the ground, so that the deposited effluvium can nurture new sandbag trees. These trees are carefully tended, because they mature slowly, but with the achievement of 15 years, they produce excellent sandbags for use in future floods. The sandbags are carefully harvested and stowed away against their eventual need in times of crisis… 
Found an interesting article about sandbags. There are alternate methods being used, such as inflatable rubber dams: link
I had to search for sandbag suppliers during Floyd and settled on the polypropylene ones.We used them to protect some critical city govt buildings and discarded them afterwards. We considered buying a machine to fill them with but used hand shovels due to lack of time and foresight. There are many types of filling machines, one readily available one is the little ld putti-putti “cement mixer”.
Here’s another neat one (on video):
http://bucketbagger.com/