Q After the floods, what happens to sandbags used to help stem flooding?
A Most of them go to a sanitary landfill or their contents are spread out over roads and fields, to be absorbed later.
Marty Ramirez, park ranger at John Redmond Reservoir at Hartford, said that the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers provides bags for sand to municipalities to fill and use.
“They would use them, but it would be with the understanding that it’s the municipality’s responsibility to dispose of them,” Ramirez said.
The Corps has needed to use sand-filled bags a few times near Hartford.
“If we have to use them on Corps property, then it’s our responsibility to get rid of them,” Ramirez said.
“Generally, if the sand can be recycled, we’ll recycle it, use it at other locations, other activities,” he said.
The sand can be spread onto fields and roads to work its way into the ground.
Most of the bags are made of a nylon composition fiber to hold up to the stress and wave action of floods, so they are not readily biodegradable.
Sandbags contaminated with ordinary flood contaminants, such as dirty water or sewage, can be put into a sanitary landfill, according to Paul Belt, environmental scientist with the response unit of the Kansas Department of Health and Environment.
“If they’re known to be contaminated with pesticide, probably not,” Belt said. “ ... If they’re real oil-soaked, they might want to identify them as such.”
After a major flood last year in Coffeyville, some of the bags contaminated with sewage were taken to the sewer plant and put on the ground there.
“Others, I know, were loaded up and taken to the landfill,” Belt said.