Council chief hits out at ‘locusts’ swarming on sandbags

People who took more sandbags than they needed during the recent storm, and some people who siphoned off sandbags when they didn’t require them at all, were likened to a ‘plague of locusts’ by the Chief Executive of Galway City Council.

The local authority, with the help of the Army, distributed 7,000 sandbags to residents and businesses to help them protect against the floods that were anticipated during the latest weather alert, for Storm Callum on October 12.

But Brendan McGrath this week said “people descended like locusts” to collect the free sandbags – including some who hadn’t a notion of being flooded.

He had checked CCTV footage of the sandbag distribution points, and identified that many people took more sandbags than they required; and a number of people took sandbags “to parts of the city that had no probability” of being flooded.

The CCTV images showed that some people “took a huge amount of sandbags” and this took away from those premises that were most at risk.
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