Canadian flooding has been on the rise the past couple of years and emergency preparedness planning is becoming more common in households. Being prepared is the deciding factor between securing your home or facing hundreds of thousands of dollars worth of flood damages. That’s a lot of money, right? Check out this infographic showing just how expensive floodwater damages are to a household.

The leading method of household flood protection is to make a couple trips down to the gas station and buy sandbags, or  to buy empty bags and fill them individually with thousands of pounds of sand. Doesn’t sound very fun, right? Canadians simply don’t have the time or manpower to build a flood barrier around their homes. And, in many situations, flooding can occur quickly and unexpectedly, catching many Canadians off guard.

On the other hand, Quik-Response Self-Expanding Sandbags  area water-activated, self-expanding, sandless alternative to the traditional sandbag. Here are 3 reasons you should give this alternative flood control barrier a try:

Easy to store & readily available:

One benefit of using sandless sandbags is that they are initially compact and can be easily stored within your home. By keeping a single box of Quik-Response in your garage or closet, you are essentially equipping your home with thousands of pounds of sandbag flood protection! They take up very little storage space and are ready when you need them.

Traditional sandbags don’t have this ability. Not only is it inconvenient to store sand at your home, its also messy. Just imagine storing 100 sandbags at your home! Where would you put them? Outside? Think again. This leads me to our next point:

Longer Shelf Life:

A major downside of traditional sandbag use is the combination of three factors: low shelf-life (sand-filled sandbags suffer dry-rot in under a year), slow deployment time and space-consuming storage. As you can see, the traditional method of sandbag usage is difficult because it requires the timing to be just right. You can’t store sand-filled sandbags because they require too much space and begin to rot rather quickly.

On the other hand, Quik-Response can be easily and conveniently stored for more than 5 years! And, if kept dry and in original packaging, many times the bags can even have a much longer shelf life!

Deploy Rapidly With Less Labor

As mentioned before, it’s almost impossible to ready for flooding with sand-filled sandbags. Imagine having hundreds of empty sandbags and thousands of pounds of sand stored at your home (a very unlikely scenario). If a flood situation arose, you’d still have to fill and tie each individual sandbag (a VERY lengthy process). Then, you’d have to carry and position each sandbag to form a barrier.

It’s slow. It’s difficult. And its inconvenient.

With sandless sandbags, there is no filling necessary. Because they expand by themselves when exposed to water, all you need to do is to set them in place and let the water activate the growth. Obviously this a much more convenient and feasible option for homeowners!

These are just a few reasons why sandless sandbags are a superior control method to traditional sandbags. For more reasons, check out this video.