Business Opportunities Weblog

June 26, 2008 by Rich Whittle | 4 Comments

MSNBC:

Sitting at the corner of Howard Street and Highway 79 is a plywood shipping crate that inventor Al Arellanes says holds the answer to future battles against floods along the Mississippi River and elsewhere.

“It deploys in one second,” Arellanes said of his product, known as RDFW, for Rapid Deployment Flood Wall, and manufactured by Geocell, his San Francisco-based company.

The company’s claims raise eyebrows in flood-prevention circles, where the standard method of holding back floodwaters remains sandbagging, a painstakingly slow process that requires massive amounts of labor to fill, carry and place each 30- to 40-pound bag.

Arellanes demonstrated his invention beneath the emergency lights at the town’s main intersection.

RDFW is a 4-foot square, 8-inch high interconnecting grid system made of the same plastic used in disposable water bottles. The 17-pound sheets fold flat, somewhat like the cardboard bottle separators in a case of wine, then snap into their ready position without the need for any tools. Once fitted together, as wide as needed and as high as 14 feet in some applications, the grids are filled by a front loader with sand and, presto, instant wall.

“We’re rated for nine feet of water,” said Arellanes, who likes to call his product “Legos for adults.”

Rey Rodriguez noted that sand will naturally condense if it’s held in place. “Get a Coke cup from McDonald’s, cut the bottom off it, fill it with sand and you can stand on it,” he said. With RDFW’s lateral reinforcement technique, “What we’re doing is reinforcing soil.”

Photo by Geocell.

In Inventions | 4 Comments
Tags: Disaster, Safety