New Sand Bag Design Used in Training Exercise, A New Advance for an Old Bag

Post in E-commerce | Tags: Bag, New Sand

For three hours, firefighters from the Carrabelle, Lanark and Apalachicola, Florida, filled sand bags to build a forty-five foot long storm surge wall. The training exercise was conducted using newly developed bright blue and yellow high tech sand bags.

The new wedge-shaped, wide mouth sand bags were a hit with the fire crews. The wall went up in half the time and nobody got their fingers cut and bruised trying to fill narrow mouth conventional bags. The resulting wall was significantly stronger than a conventional sand bags wall. The wall resisted all efforts of the fire crews to knock it over. The wall used 1,000 bags and 25,000 pounds of sand. Carrabelle runs along the Atlantic at the gulf of Mexico. Hurricanes and storm surge frequently drive water inland.

Emergency personnel hate sand bags, yet when floods come sand bags are the first line of defense. Traditional sand bags are too heavy, they make weak walls and are hard to fill. The sand bag hasn’t changed in hundreds of years. This new sand bag called a ‘Sand Brick’ was developed by a California company, Sand Brick Technologies, LLC.

There are filling machine, special shovels and literally thousands of contraptions to get sand into the narrow opening of an old style sand bag. “It never occurred to anyone just to make the mouth wider,” says John Powell, CEO of Sand Brick Technologies, LLC. “We then angled the ends so the bags interlock and color coded the sides to make them easy to use.”

“They make a really strong wall,” says Carl Whaley, Chief of the Carrabelle, Florida Fire Department.

The improvements result in a bag that only needs twenty pounds of sand vs. forty pounds of sand in a conventional bag. This means less injuries and less sand to clean up later.

As long as there is flooding there will be sand bags. This is the 21st century: it’s about time we had a better sand bag.