Sandbag machine fails its big test

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This article was published 16/04/2011 (5380 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

The province’s much-touted $35,000 sandbagging machine for Westman was a great idea on paper, but the execution was really all wet.

Premier Greg Selinger travelled to Brandon in early March to unveil the machine at the Manitoba Infrastructure and Transportation yard on First Street North.

The province provided the sandbagging machine for the city of Brandon and outlying communities to aid in emergency sandbagging efforts. With 12 chutes that propel sand into waiting bags, the made-in-Manitoba machine can produce 35,000 sandbags in an eight-hour shift.

It has been characterized as a “mobile” solution for flood-concerned communities, requiring a three-quarter-ton truck and a semi-trailer to move the arms and associated equipment respectively from community to community.

When Selinger was here for the machine’s unveiling and government photo op, he told media that it could be operated by 40 volunteers “and move a lot of sandbags very quickly.”

That’s a slightly different story than the one told by RM of Cornwallis Reeve Reg Atkinson this week.

When the municipality started planning its sandbagging efforts two weeks ago, he said his council was told it would need upwards of 60 people to safely operate the machine — manpower he says they simply couldn’t find 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 to truck in their own sand and then truck the filled bags back out to where they were needed.

So they came up with their own innovative solution — mobile sandbag filling stations using little more than a couple of timbers and some sewer piping. The forms aided in the filling of 14,000 bags that created dikes around three properties across the municipality this week. A further 16,000 were filled on Thursday and will be kept on standby in the municipal garage.

It was the same situation for the Town of Souris-RM of Glenwood where fast rising flood waters on the Souris River left local officials no choice but to finagle their own version of a sandbagging assembly line.

The municipality said it simply did not have the time or manpower needed to truck its own sand, empty bags and send volunteers into Brandon to make sandbags, or to wait for provincial officials to truck the unwieldy machine out to them.

Unfortunately, the machine’s unveiling also suffered from a badly communicated message, in that some municipal officials thought it could only be used in Brandon.

“The way we understood it is that you have to go there and do your sandbags beforehand … like if you know you’re going to have an issue 10 to 15 days before,” Souris and Glenwood emergency measures co-ordinator Sven Kreusch told the Winnipeg Free Press. “It wasn’t feasible for us because we had a bit of an emergency situation.”

It’s the same story for several other municipalities in the region — including the RM of Elton and the town of Wawanesa — which have experienced high flood levels requiring a large amount of sandbags.

Chuck Sanderson with the Emergency Measures Organization said no Westman municipalities have used the provincial sandbagging machine since it was first unveiled a month and a half ago.

That’s very unfortunate.

The province’s sandbagging machine is a great piece of flood-fighting equipment, but it may not have been the best fit for Westman — even though the province would have provided a co-ordinator and a health and safety inspector to show municipalities how to use it.

In spite of his government’s good intentions, Selinger’s sandbagging machine provided a pricey photo op and a rather nice pigeon perch.

And we all know what they say about good intentions.