Shop4Patents

An inventor from the Midwest community of Rock County invented a device which ultimately saved his own home. Stacey Babiarz invented a machine that can fill sandbags in seconds. The device can fill a sandbox in one minute. And when recent flood waters threatened his own home Stacey Babiarz used his machine to save his home as well as the homes of his neighbors.

Babiarz was inspired to invent his sandbag filling machine, which is called the Bucket Bagger, while watching news reports on Hurricane Katrina. After watching the reports of people trying to keep flood waters out with the use of sandbags, Babiarz set out to find a mechanized, portable and affordable way to efficiently fill sandbags.

Babiarz came up with the Bucket Bagger, which has a skid steer attachment that scoops up sand and funnels it into sandbags in seconds. With the Bucket Bagger sandbags are filled efficiently without the requirement of back-breaking labor.

When water levels threatened Babiarz’s own home town he filled over a half million sandbags in ten days in order to save homes, Babiarz told Alice Barr in a report for the WIFR Morning Show. Babiarz said that the whole community came together; up to fifty people working day and night, going from home to home with the Bucket Bagger, in order to save homes.

But there were some homes in Babiarz’s home town that could not be saved, because water was coming in too quickly. Babiarz told Barr that no machine could keep the water out of some homes, because it was just coming in too quickly.

The Bucket Bagger is helping communities across the country. Babiarz is currently working with response teams in Iowa to send Bucket Baggers to some of the hardest hit flood areas in the Midwest. The Bucket Bagger machines, which cost $5,400 each, are also shipped to California to assist in construction projects. You can learn more about the Bucket Bagger at www.bucketbagger.com