Hold that flood!by Jim Plunkett, freelance writer
The Military Engineer, No. 584
July 1996
The citizens of Naperville, IL, are indeed fortunate. The city is a forerunner in
emergency management. To keep people up to date, especially in fast-breaking situations,
it uses its city-owned radio station, cable-access TV, a 400-page Web site on the
Internet, and a supplemental telephone system called NAPERLINK, which uses a 'tree' menu.
And its public works department (PWD) conducts frequent exercises to hone the city's
emergency response profile. Such systems and actions are necessary and they have proven
their worth.
The city is a western suburb of Chicago, and lies astride the DuPage River. Floods are
but one of a number of disasters which could strike the city. As part of its flood control
strategy, the city created, maintains, and manages 450 water-detention basins around
Naperville. In the event of heavy rains, small tributaries route overflow water from these
basins to the river. If runoff causes a basin to overflow, drainage channels become
'mini-rivers' that can threaten nearby houses. For this reason, when heavy rains occur,
these tributaries and the river are carefully monitored.
Chicago's western suburbs have always been subject to flooding because the city opens
the locks on the Chicago River during severe storms, thereby reversing the river's natural
flow and directing runoff into the western suburbs.
The last major storm to strike the area occurred in the 1950s, when both Chicago and
many of its suburbs suffered serious floods. During the 1980s, the area was hit by number
of very severe storms. In the late 1980s, Naperville was spared significant flooding while
a nearby suburb experienced damage to over 100,000 homes; only 100 houses in Naperville
were flooded due to that storm.
In the past, sandbags were used to ensure runoff remained in the drainage channels
during heavy rainfalls. 'However,' says Steve Kaar, O & M Manager of Naperville's PWD,
'in 1983 and 1987 we sandbagged critical areas but found we could never fill the bags fast
enough.'
The city took steps to add to its emergency equipment arsenal, a propitious step than
eventually saved homeowners thousands of dollars in potential flood damage caused by the
worst flooding in the city's history.
The rains of July 1996 stretched the resources of Naperville to the breaking point when
between 11 and 14 inches of rain fell in just 12 hours. To put this in sharper
perspective, the only period of measured rainfall that has been greater in U.S. history
occurred in Texas due to a Gulf hurricane.
Homeowners were advised of the availability of the city's new sandbagging machine which
simplifies and speeds filling of sandbags. 'When the flood came last July,' said Kaar, 'we
set up the new machine in one of the equipment storage yards and announced the
availability of sandbags over the emergency communication system. Homeowners drove to the
yard, following routes described on the radio, and picked up as many bags as they needed
to shore up window wells, basement doorways, and other ground-level entrances.'
The new machine was the patented Sandbagger, a light-weight, portable,
simple-to-operate machine that eliminates filling sandbags by hand. Four workers and the
machine can fill up to 1,600 bags with sand in an hour. For the citizens and officials of
Naperville alike, the Sandbagger permitted most of them to be at their homes, protecting
their property, rather than in a 'shovel brigade' filling sandbags, and it dramatically
increased their capability to respond to the record-setting floodwaters. Operating around
the clock, the Sandbagger used about 400 tons of sand to fill about 60,000 sandbags.
The city's mayor and city council members were impressed with the Sandbagger; so much
so, another is in the city's budget. It will save citizens driving time, response time,
and will reinforce the already exceptional emergency preparedness capabilities of the city
itself. |
The
Sandbagger
Corp. 
