Control de Inundaciones y Preparación para Tormentas

A sandbag wall one bag high takes about 3 filled bags per running foot, and a wall two bags high takes about 6 per foot. A 16 foot garage door needs roughly 100 bags at two courses, and a single entry door about 20. A wall three bags high needs a base three bags wide, so count the base before you buy.

A standard 14 by 26 inch sandbag filled two-thirds full weighs about 35 to 40 pounds, which is the weight one person can lift and place repeatedly. Filled to the top the same bag runs 50 to 60 pounds, is round instead of flat, and leaves gaps in the wall.

Coarse washed concrete sand or fill sand. Both pack firm, drain, and hold their shape inside the bag. Fine plaster sand and play sand work in an emergency but pack softer and slump. Native soil and garden dirt turn to mud and should not be used.

Sandbags slow and divert water rather than sealing it out. A properly built wall keeps most of the water away from a door long enough to matter, and laying plastic sheeting under the bottom course and up the face of the wall roughly doubles how much it holds back. Expect seepage through and under any sandbag wall.

Untreated polypropylene bags are good for a single storm season and UV-treated bags for about a year outdoors before the fabric breaks down in sunlight. Bags that stayed clean can be dried and reused; bags that sat in floodwater should be treated as contaminated and replaced.

Sand that never contacted floodwater can be spread in the yard or kept for the next storm. Sand from bags that sat in floodwater may carry sewage or chemicals and should go to a landfill under your county guidance rather than into a garden bed. Empty bags are landfill waste, not recycling.

For anything longer than one storm, concrete bunker blocks, K-rail barriers and rip rap outlast a bag wall and need no refilling. Bunker blocks at 3,000 and 5,000 pounds build a toe wall in an afternoon, K-rail diverts sheet flow and debris that would flatten bags, and rip rap over fabric holds the slope the water is cutting into.

Work in this order: grade the soil so it falls away from the foundation, catch roof water in a French drain of 3/4 inch drain rock around perforated pipe in a filter sock, line the path it takes across the yard with rip rap so it does not cut a channel, and use K-rail or bunker blocks where sheet flow needs to be pushed around a building entirely.

Build a sandbag wall two bags high across the opening, about 6 bags per running foot, with plastic sheeting on the face. For a garage that floods every year, a permanent fix is better: regrade the apron, add a trench drain filled with 3/4 inch drain rock, and set the downspouts to discharge away from the slab.

Rip rap is angular quarried rock placed over fabric to hold soil where moving water would wash it away: creek and channel banks, culvert inlets and outlets, drainage swales, slope toes and driveway shoulders. The angular shape is the point, because the stones interlock instead of rolling like river rock.

Use 1 to 5 inch rock for swales, downspout splash zones and light slopes, 4 to 12 inch for culverts, drainage channels and driveway shoulders, and 12 to 18 inch rock or boulders where there is real current such as a creek bank or a spillway. Bigger water needs bigger rock, and the layer should be about 1.5 times the largest stone in depth.

One ton of rip rap covers roughly 34 square feet at 6 inches deep, 22 square feet at 9 inches, and 17 square feet at 12 inches. Measure length times width, pick the depth from the stone size, and run it through the coverage calculator on this page. Rip rap is sold here by the half ton and the ton.

Rip rap on this page runs about $36 to $280 per ton, with the tan and brown grades at the low end and the grey granite and specialty colors at the top. Half-ton units are priced proportionally, and truckload pricing is lower per ton than bagged or supersack quantities.

They are the same product. K-rail is the California term and Jersey barrier is the national one for the sloped-face concrete barrier used to separate traffic and close off site access. For flood work both do the same job: set end to end they divert sheet flow and debris away from a building or a lot entrance.

A concrete bunker block is a heavy interlocking block that stacks like an oversized brick, also sold as a bin block, ecology block or concrete deadman block. In flood work they build a toe wall to hold a cut bank or a diversion wall that water cannot push over, and they come apart again with a forklift when the season ends.

Get material on site before the first flood watch. Clear the drains and swales you already have, order sand and bags now rather than the night before, line the one swale that floods every year with rip rap, and put drain rock and a filter sock where roof water pools. Bagged sand is the first thing that sells out at every yard in the county once a watch posts.

We stock the sand that fills them, by the 50 pound bag, the 2,000 pound supersack and the truckload, at our Rosamond and Visalia yards. Ask the yard about filled and empty sandbags, which we bring in ahead of storm season.

Yes, across Southern and Central California from our Rosamond and Visalia yards, by supersack on a flatbed or loose by the truckload. Call (800) 215-7372. Storm-week orders are scheduled first come, first served, so the earlier in the week the better.