1545-50 Stormbag Hi-Tech Sandbag Alternative-50 Pack

Third time ordering, Use for moderate water control in yard and driveway. Will dry out and can be reused until the burlap is weakened. Gel can be mixed with soil to help plants keep moisture

I had bought a case of these 'instant sandbags' because our house is near a beach and wanted a little extra protection available for hurricane season. During the recent tsunami threat, we broke open the box and deployed all 50 bags. They don't stack quite the way you might expect, because the insides become more like Jello than sand and are more wobbly. One friend suggested the active contents were like what gets used in disposable diapers. They also take more than 3 minutes to fully inflate; on average, it took 10 minutes for a bag to fully plump. We pulled some bags out prematurely when we first started, and they weren't as full as later ones. Make sure you have a fresh water source and a large container nearby to soak them, because each bag needs several gallons. We used 2 garden hoses and had 2 large Tupperware storage containers, which each held 3 Stormbags and about 30 gallons of water.Once we got the assembly line going, we were able to soak and place all 50 bags in 2-3 hours. We used them to reinforce barricades we made around outside doors with cement blocks and plywood sheets. While we never had to deal with actual flooding, for the short (18") barricades we constructed, I think the bags would have worked fairly well (if we had to deal with more than a couple of feet of flooding, nothing we could have thrown up in a couple of hours would have withstood it anyway!) I would not rely on Stormbags to be the only material in your protective walls, but use them to reinforce and supplement other structures.Once the threat is past, realize that you will have to get rid of the used Stormbags. We waited to see if they would deflate, and after 5 days so far, show little signs of losing size. I ended up putting them in a weedy corner of our yard to smother some annoying fountain grass. The suggested way of getting rid of them is cutting them open and scattering the contents over your yard (they are supposedly biodegradable), which might or might not be okay where you live. They get very heavy in bulk, and stuffing them into your trash can for pickup will probably either annoy your trash people, or break the can.

I wrote a review basically in response to another review so read others comments and read my comments under that review