By Associated Press
As the Mississippi
River surged from its banks last month, 180,000 tons of sand were
shoveled into more than 9 million sandbags in towns from Illinois
to Minnesota to help hold back the flood waters.
But now, as
the river retreats and emergency officials think about cleaning
up, the sandbags that helped save the towns have become sodden,
polluted liabilities. Removing them is a public health issue.
"They're
wet and fishy," said Chief Larry Granneman of the Niota Volunteer
Fire Department, which used more than 200,000 sandbags to shore
up the town's aged, battered levee.
Granneman
said the bags must stay in place for at least another week but
he and other officials know that when the cleanup begins they're
unlikely to get the same help from volunteers who were there when
the crisis was at its peak.
"It's
more glamorous to fight the flood than to clean up when the flood
waters recede," Illinois Emergency Management Director Mike
Chamness said.
The U.S. Army
Corps of Engineers gives local officials a "reasonable time
period" after flood waters recede to remove temporary structures
from levees enrolled in the corps' maintenance program. Otherwise,
there are no federal guidelines on how long sandbags can remain
in place, and no instructions on what to do with them, so state
and local governments are left to devise their own disposal plans.
"They
don't even recommend you going into the water during a flood fight
because of bacteria, oil, sewage and everything else that gets
in the water that's not supposed to," said corps spokesman
Ron Fournier. "It would go hand-in-hand that a sandbag that's
been exposed to that is something you wouldn't want to have hanging
around too long."
Officials
said disposal plans are largely modeled on actions taken after
the flood of 1993, when sand was recycled when possible and most
of the bags ended up in landfills.
Illinois expects
to provide state help for many small communities that can't handle
the task alone. Minnesota expects cities and counties to dispose
of their own sandbags.
Kevin Smith,
spokesman for the Minnesota Department of Public Safety, said
the bags will be thrown away and uses will be found for the polluted
sand.
"The
sand itself gets recycled for use in non-human contact areas.
It may go to DOT (Department of Transportation) for them to mix
it up with cement to repair the shoulders of roads, for example.
Obviously, it doesn't go into kids' sandboxes in the backyard,"
he said.
At least some
of the 400,000 sandbags in Davenport, Iowa, may end up in sandboxes,
however. To recoup part of the expense of building a temporary
levee, the city plans to sell "clean" sandbags, those
that were filled but never used, for 25 cents each.
Officials
hope to recycle many others. Some intact bags will be moved to
help build up a levee in a flood-prone area of Davenport and the
contents of others will be used as filler outside the city's compost
facility.
"Some
(sandbags) never left the truck," said city spokeswoman Jennifer
Nahra. "Of the rest, we hope we can use them wherever possible."
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