Q: Why are sandbags not being widely provided for residents like they were in 1993?
A: Well, some sandbags are being provided to residents.
According to the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers, which oversees Tuttle Creek and other dams, it’s the responsibility of local governments to provide sandbags for flood events.
Riley County Emergency Management has a very limited supply of sandbags at the moment and does not stockpile sand. How many bags exactly Riley County Emergency Management Director Pat Collins couldn’t say for sure, but he said officials were left with about 10,000 bags after the 1993 flood. Before the event, he said, he had about a million sandbags to give out so people could redirect storm water and debris from homes and areas.
Since then, they’ve been using them on and off for different projects and impacted roads.
“That’s really what those are for,” Collins said. “They weren’t for the public use. Ten thousand doesn’t cover what I’ve got, and that’s about what I had when I started after the ‘93 flood.”
Collins said the county is allowing some people in flood-prone areas to pick up 15 sandbags to protect parts of their house but recommends people focus more on moving valuables to other locations like a storage unit or someone else’s home.
“Move your cars, move any items, clean your garden shed out, get that stuff out, move it off the floor, things like that that,” Collins said. “Surely people know somebody that lives out of the floodplain they could leave those with for a week or two.”
According to the Manhattan Flood Updates Facebook page, homeowners and businesses from the Blue River area can pick up to 15 empty sandbags at 6215 Tuttle Creek Blvd. from 8 a.m. to 4 p.m. Monday through Friday.
If people wanted more sandbags, Collins suggested residents buy some at Home Depot (about $18 for 50) or Menards ($0.29 per bag).
Sand is available at Midwest Concrete Materials for sale and Hartford Sand for free.
The flood updates page recommends people use filled bags to temporarily blockade doors, garage doors and window wells to keep water out while moving items, rather than building walls with them.
Collins said he has requested more sandbags, but the request has not been approved yet. Even then, Collins said sandbagging isn’t the most effective method of protecting homes and belongings.
“Part of the problems we ran into back then were people put them on public property, they’d put them on private property, and then when the flood was over they wanted us to come pick them up because they were contaminated from the floodwater,” he said. “And they didn’t work. That’s the bad part. We had people that spent a week to 10 days building a sandbag wall, and it didn’t work and they flooded their house. In a week, they could’ve gotten every piece of furniture out of their house, but then they didn’t.”
The flood updates page says sandbags do not keep standing or rising water out for an extended time and even for short term use, they may require a trash or water pump.
