zlacker

Question -- what is 'sand bagging'?

>>little+(OP)
Assembling and placing sandbags to hold back floodwaters.

>>little+(OP)
https://i.imgur.com/BlUJxIj.jpg

Was my parent's home. We were south of Fargo, outside of the city dike. Fargo is very, very flat farmland. Our house was 40' above the river. The top of the city dike was around 43'. We melted down the ice, put down a sheet of plastic, and then built a wall of sandbags. Bonus, it was very cold, so you essentially had to bag and place the sandbag before the sand froze. We put around 10k sacks around the house -- and saved it. Nothing like paddling a canoe to my brothers to resupply fuel for the generators powering the sump-pumps that handled the water that seeps in.

We got very, very lucky. The weather froze the ice a few inches thick and it stopped rising. Had water reached that last bag, Fargo would have been a giant swimming pool.

>>heelix+94
How do you acquire 10k sacks of sand on such short notice? Also, how much does that cost?

>>neckar+Uh
The sacks were pretty easy to order. You would have a dump truck come out and leave a pile of sand on the driveway. From there, you basically shovel/fill sacks like mad and either place them on your wall or put them someplace heated. Next day you would order another truck of sand. A stupid amount of manpower was involved. Entire high school football team came over to help fill on one of the days. The entire city basically shut down and did little but. We did the same for at least five or six houses that we did for ours. Exhausting.

https://i.imgur.com/Ijzt56t.jpg https://i.imgur.com/FR0qla3.jpg https://i.imgur.com/KDvP5Du.jpg

I'll have to dig up some of the 'end of days' photos where it almost breached the wall. You had to buy flood insurance early on... which was pricey, but covered a lot of the supplies. It was several thousand dollars for the 2009 construction.

We had 3 '500 year' floods. 1997, 2009, and 2011. The Red river flows north, which is an oddity. Lots of snow, with folks redirecting water caused some new records. Grand Forks was flooded out in one of those years - Fargo almost fell. By the time the third major flood happened - we were ready.

https://i.imgur.com/jhAIMMn.jpg

We set up a series of hesco bags and filled them directly. Worked great, and they came and picked up the bags to be reused in the Bismark flooding. Sand doubled in price each time... and the city really wanted this property on the cheap... so that last run took hours but cost about 20k. (yikes) After that, the city built a permanent dike that protected the property.

>>heelix+Wm
> By the time the third major flood happened - we were ready.

i was expecting to see a raised home on the pic, not a better way to fill sandbags. oh well.

>>asldfh+en3
https://goo.gl/maps/aF44Afshj81FLvLw6

If you look at the aerial view, you can spot the neighbors homes that did not make it and the edge of the city dike now in the back yard. Many houses flooded. Heartbreaking when you saw folks trying to have a fire truck flood their failing dike with clean water rather than have the sewage/etc fill the house.