What Happens To Sandbags After Floods?
MINNEAPOLIS (WCCO) -- For weeks, river towns fill sandbag after sandbag.
Moorhead put together 55,000, Stillwater has deployed 60,000 and Hastings filled 11,000.
So, that had WCCO viewers like Scott from Rice and Mary from St. Paul wanting to know: What happens to the sandbags after the floods? Good Question.
"Every community is going to be different," says Mike Mroz, public works director for the city of Hudson.
Hudson made 4,000 bags available to its residents. They took a wait-and-see approach this year before filling their bags, given their higher elevation compared to other river towns. Every year, those towns have to make that cost-benefit decision when it comes to using equipment, buying bags and coordinating volunteers.
"It's not let's just get together on a Sunday afternoon and sandbag," Mroz says "It's a week-long process."
Hudson uses bags that are made of polypropylene, which are plastic. There are other bags on the market, which are biodegradable, but Mroz says those tend to be more expensive and puncture more easily.
"Communities I've worked with have always used polypropelene," he says, citing his ten years with the public works department in Wabasha.
In Moorhead, city crews and contractors will cut open the clean, dry sandbags and use the sand for roads and other projects. Hastings fills biodegradable bags that can later be used to backfill trenches or eroded areas. In Hudson, the city is providing a space for residents to dump their sand in a big pile, which the city can use for fill or street projects.
"You're not going to put it in playgrounds," says Mroz.
Leftover empty bags often go to landfills because it's much easier and less time consuming for crews and contractors to cut open the bags rather than untie what could be double or triple knots.
For sandbags that have come into contact with dirty water, that's a different story. Both Minnesota and Wisconsin guidelines say those full bags should go to a special landfill.
Clean sandbags can be saved and reused, but Mroz says they will eventually break down and won't last more than a year or two.