New Surplus Geocell Flood Wall Protection System

2000 Linear feet x 4 feet high available for immediate shippment. (Call for Pricing)

July 15, 2005—College student volunteers assemble RDFW at US Army Corps of Engineers test site on the Missouri River, Brownville, Nebraska.

Introducing the Rapid Deployment Flood Wall

It has taken years of development and testing, but mankind has finally created a better floodfighting tool than the tired, old sandbag.

Geocell's Rapid Deployment Flood Wall provides a superior defense against flooding by being quick and easy to deploy, requiring less fill material, having a smaller footprint, and requiring 99% less labor than sandbags.

RDFW allows you to make use of modern earthmoving machinery to construct more flood wall in less time. With RDFW in your inventory, you can protect dramatically greater amounts of land and property than you could with sandbags. More importantly, RDFW's superior coverage reduces the threat to human life.

RDFW is reusable, making it extremely cost-effective. Unlike sandbags, RDFW requires no costly disposal for itself or its fill material. RDFW is made of an environmentally friendly, recyclable Eastman plastic that can be stored for 10 years or more in any working warehouse. RDFW is also resistant to the vermin and immune to the mildew which plagues sandbags in storage.

RDFW is available now for order in any quantity.

July 16, 2005—RDFW nears completion at US Army Corps of Engineers test site on the Missouri River, Brownville, Nebraska. This structure was filled using a clamshell crane.

Finally, a replacement
for sandbags!

For over 100 years, floods have been fought with two main weapons—human labor and sandbags.

It's time for a change.

Human labor is finite and expensive. Sandbags are inefficient. And neither takes advantage of the great array of construction equipment readily available in most flood situations.

What is needed is a dramatic improvement in floodfighting technology, an improvement that allows you to leverage your limited labor resources with the immense power of earthmoving machinery. What is needed is an improvement that is dramatically superior to the tired, old sandbag.

June 2004—It took 419.8 man-hours to build this sandbag structure.

Stop and think about it

What are the hidden costs of sandbags?

Sandbags may be cheap to purchase, but they are expensive to use. Sandbag walls have inefficient trapezoidal or triangular cross-sections, requiring up to twice as much fill as square walls. Sandbags require enormous amounts of physical labor which, while it is often provided by volunteers, is often paid for after the flood event as part of disaster relief. Sandbag walls are expensive to dispose of, typically being hauled off to landfills at great expense. And in stockpiling sandbags, there is almost always some loss to vermin and mildew.

But beyond the hidden monetary costs of sandbags, consider the true cost of relying on sandbags.

Sandbags have proven insufficient defense against floods time and again. The slow, manual rate at which sandbag walls can be constructed has resulted in billions of dollars in flood damages, year after year after year. But more significant than any amount of dollars is the trauma resulting from flooded homes and the loss of life that occurs annually as the result of flooding. That is the true cost of sandbags.

June 2004—It took 39.4 man-hours to build this RDFW structure.

Sandbags are more expensive
than you might think

Anyone familiar with stacking sandbags knows that it is slow, miserable, backbreaking work.

"There had to be a better way," decided 20-year veteran floodfighter Al Arellanes.

In 1983, Arellanes, in conjunction with the US Army Corps of Engineers, began developing improved and innovative methods for combating floods. In 1996, as President of Geocell Systems, Arellanes licensed the Army Corps‘ Sand Confinement Grid technology and used it as a basis for developing the Rapid Deployment Flood Wall (RDFW).

RDFW is a modular, collapsible plastic grid that serves as a direct replacement for sandbag walls. Assembled by as few as two people, an RDFW wall is quickly expanded into place and then filled from the top with a loader, excavator, bottom-dump, or other piece of earthmoving equipment.

Drawing on his 20 years of floodfighting experience, Arellanes and the Geocell team designed RDFW specifically to meet the needs and constraints of real-world floodfighting situations. Besides being fast to deploy, RDFW is light enough to be handled by two people, small enough not to be unmanageable in the wind, fits easily into a pickup truck or helicopter, requires no special tools, and is simple enough for anyone to use. RDFW has a smaller footprint and cross-section than sandbag walls, making it ideal for levee topping or urban use, and RDFW can be filled with a wider range of materials than sandbags.

Each container holds 100 RDFW units. Picture taken at Cedar City, Utah emergency flood incident, May 2004.

How safe is your stockpile of sandbags?
When you really need them, will you open your warehouse to find your burlap mildewed? Will your plastic bags be infested with rats' nests? What percentage of bags can you expect to lose? When the water is rising, can you afford to lose any?
Why take chances with sandbags?
RDFW is made of a tough, flexible, environmentally responsible plastic produced by Eastman Chemical Company and extruded specifically for Geocell's RDFW by Spartech Corporation. It is immune to mildew, is resistant to vermin, and can be stored for 10 years or more in any working warehouse.

There is a USACE-tested
alternative to sandbags

In April of 2000, the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers' Engineering Research and Development Center (ERDC) in Vicksburg, Mississippi conducted extensive testing on Geocell's RDFW.

The results were conclusive and stunning.

As noted in the official USACE report, a 50-foot-long, 4-foot-high section of RDFW was subjected to 40 hours of wave action totalling 72,000 waves. Wave height was varied between 0.42 ft and 1.52 ft.

The Rapid Deployment Flood Wall proved able to withstand this severe testing with minimal, easily repairable damage. Total sand loss proved to be only eight percent.

In addition to wave testing, RDFW was also tested for its ability to contain hydrostatic load. At a maximum head of 3.33 ft, underseepage was only 22.8 gallons/hr per foot of wall. At this rate, a small 3-hp gasoline pump could drain nearly 400 feet of wall.

July 2005—RDFW is removed after flood incident outside Cedar City, UT. RDFW was folded up and put back into crates for use in another flood.

The RDFW is reusable

One of RDFW's biggest advantages over sandbags is that it can be dismantled, recertified and re-used. The ability to re-use RDFW over several flood events dramatically reduces its effective per-use cost.

Try doing that with sandbags.

Even when an RDFW grid module is damaged, it can still be repaired and recertified for use again. Constructed out of 14 plastic panels, a damaged RDFW grid module can be rebuilt simply by replacing any damaged panels within that module.