Rain Brings Flood of Business for Sandbag Suppliers

Clara DeBoer believed she was in for another quiet, rainy day at the office Wednesday, with a cup of steaming coffee at her dispatch desk and a good novel to pass the time.

But when she arrived at her job at West Coast Sand and Gravel, she found the phones ringing nonstop.

“Man, oh man,” said DeBoer, whose company delivers sandbags for several firms in Orange and Los Angeles counties, “it has been going crazy.”

As the rain around Orange County got heavier Wednesday afternoon, so did the workload for the handful of sandbag suppliers, who were inundated with calls from residents unable to obtain sandbags from depleted city yards.

For instance, Anaheim, which provides residents with sandbags, went through 5,000 50-pound bags and had to order 6,000 more, city spokesman Brett Colson said. He did not know how long the new order would last.

Police departments also reported fielding calls from hundreds of residents across the county, desperately looking to dam up seeping water.

As a result, residents and businesses coping with overflowing flood control channels were turning to the Yellow Pages, calling private companies and paying an average of $1.40 a bag.

And in turn, the sandbag suppliers were kept unusually busy packing plastic and burlap bags at record speed and hauling them off by the hundreds to trouble spots.

DeBoer, for instance, said that she had dispatched a steady stream of delivery trucks, each carrying more than 1,000 bags to a variety of locations in Orange County. “The trucks are all on the road,” she said.

Other companies were sending much-needed sandbags as far north as the Sepulveda Dam Basin in Los Angeles County.

“As long as we’ve been in business, we’ve never sold this many bags,” said Jess Struiksma, manager of Bob’s Masonry in the City of Industry.

Don Augustine, manager of E.D.S., an Orange supplier, said that a dozen workers were outside all day, filling sandbags as fast as they could be put into trucks.

The rare rush in business was attributed to a typical lack of planning by residents, many of whom live in flood plains or near steep hillsides, lulled by the abundant sunshine of Southern California.

“They started to panic, and we just stepped in,” Augustine said.