> Incompetent and bungling as we were, sandbagging goes shockingly fast. It must be astonishing to watch a crew with a few days’ practice; like fast motion film

> Incompetent and bungling as we were, sandbagging goes shockingly fast. It must be astonishing to watch a crew with a few days’ practice; like fast motion film, but not. I volunteered with a local volunteer emergency response team to respond to a flood in southern Indiana 3-4 years ago. We were tasked with sandbagging for a while, even though it was fairly obvious that the river was going to flood the area too widely for sandbags to be useful. I helped with that effort for a while, risking my bad back in the process, and I agree: it does go very quickly. It also made me think that a fair bit of any emergency response is for show: it probably won't help, but it can't hurt, so you throw people at everything until you run out of people or new data helps you refine what will actually work. If nothing else it probably made the locals feel better than watching a bunch of people stand around doing nothing at all. Fortunately I was able to later help in a more meaningful way, assisting with evacuations and providing security all night in hopes that the abandoned homes wouldn't be targeted by opportunistic thieves. Unfortunately, despite our efforts, it turned out that someone (or multiple someones) from nearby communities used boats to hit some of the flooded homes, bypassing our security perimeter. Frustrating to see.