A water-filled dam you can deploy yourself to stop flooding

Conrad B - September 18, 2020

Gear

I’ve seen images like this in a lot of prepper groups:

And it got me looking around for products that might do something similar. I’d seen an inflatable version before, but I found this American-made water-filled alternative called the Aqua Dam and wanted to share. Thought it was pretty smart and potentially effective at minimizing the impact of flooding.

I’ve got nothing to go on beyond the video though. What do you think?

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I’ve never been in a flood *crosses fingers* but my gut tells me that there are sure to be big chunks of stuff flowing down with the water that would make this less effective? Or if it got caught underneath it, it would prop it up and defeat the purpose?

Maybe it’s tough enough to handle most of the incoming debris.

 

any intel on cost?

 

I had the same question. The official site doesn’t say, but the top result when I searched said this from 2017:

AquaDam runs $20 per foot for the shortest option, 30 inches, and $50 per foot for the tallest, 4 feet, plus shipping fees and taxes.

The average home needs 300 to 400 feet of AquaDam, while a business might need more, depending on its size. A homeowner can expect to spend much less: $8,000 to $12,000, on average.

So $8k to start.

Source:

https://www.bloombergquint.com/onweb/hurricane-harvey-is-helping-sell-personal-dams-for-homeowners

 

As someone who has spent horrible days filling sandbags, I sure like the idea of just turning on the hose. I wonder if a standard house garden hose can be used to fill it up quickly enough to even matter? Not that you would need it to fill up super quickly, but you’d probably want it to take less than a day for a typical home.

This probably wouldn’t be good against a flood caused by something like a tsunami. Violent surges would probably overwhelm it. But it could do great against more standard flooding, like overflow from a river.