Sandbagging Sandbags

Every year there are scenes of floods somewhere in the United States… and pictures of volunteers, sometimes thousands of them, shoveling sand out of loads hauled in by dump trucks, filling bags and forming human chains to stack sandbags fast enough to thwart impending doom from rising waters. Spring is the time of the “big thaw,” and water visits folks down the hill with routine force. The Red River rises in Fargo, North Dakota all the time, and the residents are massive consumers of bags and sand: “The city used about 3 million sandbags in 2009, the year of its worst recorded flood. Last year, the fifth worst, the city filled and stacked 1.5 million. But now, even though an army of volunteers began working earlier than usual at Fargo’s ‘Sandbag Central’ and filled nearly 3 million, the city has used only about 500,000 sandbags.” New York Times, April 8^th.

Ever think how completely inefficient these efforts are? Kind of like capping soda bottles by hand instead of using a capping machine? Might there be a better way or are our scientists dumbfounded when it comes to barricading water? Good news, disaster fans! There are better ways! Like the Aqua Dam (pictured above left) or the Aqua Levee (pictured above right) … where water – in big fat tubes that can be deployed quickly – is used to barricade… er… water!

New products abound as Fargo faces spring floods again: “Fargo seems braced to repel an invading army. Once again there are plenty of the usual sandbag piles and earthen levies. But this year, for the first time, less of the city will be protected by sandbags than by alternative barriers, like the braced L-shaped walls of the AquaFence, industrial-size sacks of sand known as TrapBags and the earth-filled wire cages of the Hesco bastions.” NY Times.

The underlying message is that we are able to make our world better if we just think about how to solve problems and then implement our vision with appropriate structures and technological products. Stronger plastic tubes that can withstand the ravages of storms; after all, a leaking barrier only exacerbates the flood risk. Panels built to withstand the tons of pressure of water raging against fairly lightweight levees and temporary dams. The technologies seem simple enough – like why didn’t we think of these before – but when you really drill down, the required skills demanded chemical engineers designing the materials collude with structural and civil engineers to create the structural requirements coupled with geologists and climatologists to set the parameters and expectations.

Think about the education that resulted in such simple and cost-effective solutions to problems that might otherwise impose billions of dollars of damage. We can deploy these short term solutions, averting massive potential natural disasters, pending better long term solutions. And just think what it would have been like if those chemical, civil and structural engineers or those climatologists and geologists had been unable to attend the universities that prepared them for these seemingly simple but elegant solutions. What if they had been born 17 to 20 years ago and were facing the budget-mandated shuttering of educational programs, denied access to the curriculum they needed to be trained in their chosen field because of underfunding and crowded bulging classrooms, didn’t get enough of a background in public high school to get into a decent engineering or science program or were simply unable to afford to go to college? Welcome to 2012!

I’m Peter Dekom, and the utter failure of legislators to connect the dots as they cut educational budgets with no regard to our future is nothing short of appalling.