? If you have had to use sandbags

My parents and my sister had to get sand bags when the river across the road from them started rising. They homes sit far back, but the water did rise and flood my sister's basement. My mom's home didn't get flooded but it got close. I don't know what they did with the bags after. I'll have to ask them, next time I see them.

We keep ours in the garage in the winter and in a hidden corner at the back of the house in warmer weather. We live on a dirt road at the bottom of a ridge and need to block the top of our driveway when there is heavy rain as the road washes out and all the water runs down towards our garage. We also have a drain installed but the rains have been crazy heavy these last few years.

We actually keep slowly adding to our sandbag stash, which is another reason we keep old ones.
We started with enough to block one spot, then we added enough for one other spot, etc.

We live high enough that we don't need them, but we do live in a town along the Mississippi River which, of course, does flood. The sandbags stink! It is recommended here, that you remove the wet sandbags and take the filthy, contaminated sand to the dump once the threat of flooding has passed. You CAN store and reuse the bags, but you need to make sure they are completely dry (I think I heard to lay them out in the sun, as that helps kill some of the germs). According to the Corps of Engineers (which is responsible for operating and maintaining the miles of navigable channels, locks, and ports of the Mississippi River),the sandbags and sand can be" contaminated with a lot of bad things from the river – feces, chemicals, all kinds of bacteria. You don’t know what could be in the water, and that absorbs into the sandbags.”

For all the flooding we have here, I’ve never seen anyone use sandbags. I wonder why that is.