Mark out: Parry Sound manufacturer develops product that may revolutionalize flood control methods worldwide.

• Author: Ross, Ian
• Position: Watermark Innovations Inc. - Brief Article - Company Profile

When the flood waters are rising and the dam is about to burst, there are usually plenty of volunteer hands pitching in to fill and pile sandbags.

But as the waters recede, who is there to help mop up the mess?

What is left is a mountain of mouldy and ragged sandbags, saturated with bacteria-filled sand and silt that can cause untold ecological damage to waterways, and can result in massive cleanup bills.

"The biggest cost is not the deployment of sandbags, it's when they're used," says Parry Sound entrepreneur Mike Bishop, who has come up with an environmentally friendly alternative for flood defence.

Floods are the single-largest natural cause of damage and destruction in the world, resulting in about $25 billion worth of property damage in North America each year, and about $100 billion worldwide.

Deploying the traditional sandbag dike is an expensive and labour-intensive task, requiring plenty of people power and a lot of grunt work.

But Bishop, a mechanical engineer and consultant, has been working on a reusable flood-control barrier that can be deployed in the field within minutes and then be folded up and whisked away just as fast.

As president and CEO of Watermark Innovations Inc., Bishop, 58, and three employees, including his son and research project manager, John, have spent the past two years creating an inflatable module, composed of a Kevlar-reinforced, geotextile material.

The material is coated with a PVC compound, which provides a sealant, is ultraviolet light resistant and has antibacterial inhibitors.

Bishop says one of his modules replaces hundreds of stacked sandbags.

Using a leaf blower, air is inflated into the empty 45-kilogram module, then the air is forced out with water pumped in directly from the flood source to weigh the bag down.

The triangular-shaped module, about four-and-half metres long and one metre high, holds almost 4,700 litres of water. The whole deployment process takes about 20 minutes.

The modules are then strung together with connection plates to form a barrier, strong enough to hold back 80 per cent of what Bishop calls most "passive" flooding.

"When this thing is filled, it is extremely stable," Bishop says. "You cannot move it.

"The Kevlar gives it a structural strength from a burst-and-tear point of view."

Bishop bought the technology from a predecessor company called WOW (wall of water).

He was hired by an investors group to research how their money was being spent.

Seems the now-defunct...