MANATEE, Fla -- When you’re getting ready for a storm every minute counts. The last thing you want to do is wait in a long line for sandbags. Manatee County figured out a way to speed things up. The county bought five sandbagging machines.
“We’ve got four seconds on the timer to fill sandbag, it’s off to the sewing machine, three seconds, and in 10 seconds or less you have a sandbag,” “said Chad Butzow, interim director of Public Works for Manatee County.
What took a minute at best will move a lot faster now and so should the lines, said Butzow. He said, “We had residents who were spending three, four, five hours in line to get sandbags last year. We hope to have virtually no line or a continuously moving line this year.”
“By the time we were notified it was going to flood, it flooded,” said Rick Fay, who lives in the Centre Lake subdivision off Prospect Road. He’d like the county to give out more than the 10 bags allowed per address, but he’s happy about the machines.
Fay said, “It’s going to make it go a lot faster.”
Last year Manatee gave out a record 150,000 sandbags during the three days before Hurricane Irma each bag filled up by hand.
“We had 80 people running the four large sites last year, with these there needs to be 20 people maximum,” said Butzow.
The machines cost $15,000 each. The county says by freeing up staff, the public works department can respond to other service calls from the community before a storm.
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