A victim himself of the recent floods in the United Kingdom, Scott Simon 25 from Worcestershire and a group of friends used a rubber inflatable boat to help victims of the floods to safety. During this rescue mission he realized how quickly the flood water came and how unprepared people were. So within 4 weeks of the floods that caused so much havoc, Simon has launched FloodFight selling a revolutionary ‘self-inflating sandbag’.
The self-inflating sandbags require no sand, you just submerge them in water and within 3-5 minutes they expand from 1lb to 34lbs. The bags work by using recyclable type bags filled with polyacrylate polymer which absorbs the water and protects from flooding up to 2 feet high.
The advantages of these against normal sandbags are that they are extremely light and therefore easy to carry and deploy (these can be deployed in half the time of a sand filled bag – crucial in rising floods), even by the elderly. They don’t take much storage space up and you don’t have to rely on finding and filling with sand. You can even use these bags to soak up any water that has entered the building.
FloodFight has already sold over 100,000 units and currently has a backlog of orders, Simon comments: “We just can’t keep up with the demand, people are now preparing for the ‘next floods’ and we have hardly done any marketing. All marketing was done when the flooding was still going on so word of mouth has quickly spread”.
They are also in talks with one major insurance company regarding giving bags to their clients in the flood risk areas as a way to reduce the number of claims.
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