New kind of floodwall hyped as replacement for sandbags

CAPE GIRARDEAU, MISSOURI - Goodbye, sandbags. Hello, plastic. <br> <br> If manufacturers of the Rapid Development Floodwall have their way, that&#39;s what river communities facing occasional flood danger will be saying in the near future. <br> <br> The product made its Missouri debut yesterday in Cape Girardeau, attended by local dignitaries and the Army Corps of Engineers. <br> <br> The floodwall&#39;s manufacturers include St. Louis-based plastics company Spartech, California-based Geocell Systems Incorporated, and Georgia-based Eastman Chemical Company. They are attempting to sell the government what is basically an expandable and reusable plastic floodwall. They claim it can be filled with sand 100 times faster than sandbags. <br> <br> The floodwall, developed through a cooperative agreement with the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers, is an expandable, stackable, modular wall made of tough, lightweight plastic. <br> <br> Tuesday&#39;s demonstration included two groups of volunteers -- politicians and employees for the companies involved. One group made sandbags and the other put together the floodwall. With a tug, the plastic sheets formed a boxed row of plastic cells, each able to hold roughly the same amount of sand as 37 sandbags. <br> <br> After several of the plastic sheets were stacked to about four feet high, a Bobcat front loader quickly dumped sand into the squares as the other group worked with their hands and shovels. <br> <br> During the same half-hour that it took one group to fill a handful of sandbags, another created a 20-foot-long plastic floodwall that is roughly the equivalent of one-thousand sandbags. <br> <br> The asking price: $12 million, which would pay for roughly 16 miles of floodwall that could be used up to six times -- though the manufacturers said they know they can expect to get about half of that. <br> <br> Another demonstration is scheduled Thursday in St. Louis.