RM gets creative to fill sandbags

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This article was published 15/04/2011 (5504 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

Rising flood waters forced a pair of Westman municipalities to use a little rural innovation after the province’s new sandbagging machine failed to live up to the hype.

Premier Greg Selinger travelled to Brandon in early March to unveil a $35,000 sandbagging machine at the Manitoba Infrastructure and Transportation yard on First Street North.

Selinger touted the machine as a "mobile" means for Brandon and area communities to rapidly make sandbags for stockpile in the event of an emergency.

However, the machine — which requires a three-quarter-ton truck and a semi-trailer to move from community to community — has proved useless for at least two Westman communities.

RM of Cornwallis Reeve Reg Atkinson says when they began planning their sandbagging efforts two weeks ago, they inquired about using the sandbagging machine to help them create the stockpile they would need.

However, they were told they would need upwards of 60 people to safely operate the machine — manpower he says they simply couldn’t muster at the time.

"It was going to take so many people to do it that we just, frankly, decided against it," Atkinson said.

Not only would they have to supply their own people, but they would have had to truck in their own sand and then truck the filled bags back out to where they were needed.

So, in true "farmer fix" fashion, the RM created its own mobile sandbag filling stations to aid in its sandbagging efforts this week, using little more than a couple of two-by-fours and some sewer piping.

Poured from the bucket of a front-end loader or manually with shovels, sand is dumped into bags placed inside small sections of sewer pipes that have been affixed in a wood form. When it’s full, the form is pulled away, leaving full bags ready for tying.

"They may be crude, but they work," Atkinson said. "It’s pretty simple to show people how to use the machines we’ve made. You just show them for two minutes and then they can do it better that we can inside of the next two minutes."

The forms aided in the filling of 14,000 bags that created dikes around three properties across the municipality this week.

Yesterday, volunteers worked to fill the RM’s remaining 16,000 bags, which will be kept on standby in the municipal garage.

It was much the same story for the Town of Souris/RM of Glenwood this week, where officials say the level of the Souris River came up far too fast for them to be able to truck their own sand, empty bags and manpower into Brandon to make sandbags or to wait for provincial officials to truck the sandbagging machine out to them.

"We needed it, like, now," emergency measures co-ordinator Sven Kreusch said. "We didn’t think (the flooding) would be that bad."

So they too relied on volunteers to create their own unique brand of sandbagging assembly line.

"We had stands made beforehand and what we did was cut five-gallon pails to kind of act as a funnel," he said. "We had somebody hold the bag underneath and somebody dumped sand from the top, then somebody tied them and we threw them on trailers."

Nearly 150 people worked to make about 21,000 sandbags this week, Kreusch said, which were used to protect several properties in the area.

Chuck Sanderson, executive director with the province’s Emergency Measures Organization, said they will work with any municipality that wants to either bring in volunteers to be trained on and use the sandbagging machine at the MIT yard in Brandon or have the machine trucked out to them for use.

However, he said that no municipalities in Westman have utilized the machine since it was unveiled at the First Street North yard nearly a month and a half ago.

"These sandbag machines are for high volume, when you’re really needing a lot of volume … but if community needs, say, 2,000 sandbags or something like that, it’s probably easier for them to get people and do it by hand."

However, Brandon East Progressive Conservative candidate Mike Waddell says that’s simply unacceptable.

Waddell was one of the dozens of people who volunteered to help sandbag in the RM of Cornwallis this week and said he was absolutely stunned to find out that municipalities in need were stymied by the sandbagging machine’s requirements.

"We’ve got this wonderful piece of equipment that’s been in photo-ops like crazy, but if it’s not suited for our region and our region’s needs, then we’ve got to find a way to make it so," he said.

"The province needs to show more leadership on the issue."

Despite the fact that a single municipality has yet to use it, Sanderson said the machine will remain in Brandon until it is either required somewhere else or an analysis is done on whether it will be needed in the area.

 

Thousands of sandbags in use

The City of Brandon has filled more than 30,000 sandbags since securing its own 1,500 bag-per-hour sandbagging machine in mid-March.

Some will be used to plug storm sewers, weigh down manholes and secure barricades, while others will be used this weekend to protect two properties in the city’s east end that sit just outside the perimeter of the city’s dike.

The remainder will sit on standby in the event that portions of the city’s dike breaches or new areas of flooding concern emerge.

While general manager of operational service Rod Sage notes that the bags they’ve filled so far have been filled primarily to meet the city’s needs, "if push came to shove" the city would hand them over to municipalities that required a ready-to-go supply.

The city’s sandbagging machine could also be loaded up on a trailer and loaned out to surrounding municipalities, provided the city is not in immediate need of the machine, he said.

The city still has about 30,000 unfilled bags in stock, of which a portion are being made available to the public to maximum of 50 per household, provided they fill them themselves at the Public Works yard on Richmond Avenue East.

The province, meanwhile, does not have an emergency stockpile of prepared sandbags for municipalities or individual property owners to access if they are caught off guard without a supply.

The 1.4 million filled bags currently being stored at Winnipeg’s Kapyong Barracks are for "provincial requirements," a provincial spokesperson said Thursday.

 

» Brandon Sun