Tinkerer a handy guy for Cedar Rapids Public Works

CEDAR RAPIDS - Randy Blakely is proof that you don't need a barn and an assortment of aging farm equipment to know how to tinker and turn a pile of nothing into something.

Blakely, who is a head heavy equipment operator for the city of Cedar Rapids' Public Works Department, has found the city's garage just as conducive to invention as any shop on any farm along any gravel road in Iowa.

Rural Iowa and its reputation for inventiveness has nothing on him.

“Randy's a real go-to kind of guy,” says Mike Duffy, the city's public works maintenance operations superintendent. “If we have an issue with something, and we need someone to take a look at a project from outside the box, we go to Randy.

“And what makes him a good resource, he's real good with his hands and with fabrication. It's one thing to have an idea. But it's another thing to actually build it. Randy can do both.”

Sandbag machine

Blakely's latest gem - a sandbag-making machine - is especially relevant in a city that had a historic flood disaster five years ago, had a major threat of another disaster seven weeks ago and continues to face the specter of more flooding in the future.

As the 59-year-old Blakely tells it, the idea to come up with a better, faster and less backbreaking way to fill thousands of sandbags had been spinning in his mind for some time. The city's flood disaster of 2008 moved the idea along, and Duffy and Craig Hanson, the city's public works maintenance manager, asked him to see if he could come up with something.

“I was only 80 percent sure it could work,” says Blakely. “But that was good enough to kick me loose to try.”

Blakely says he started with a discarded hopper from an old salt-and-sand spreader that was sitting on a rack in the public works garage. Next, he took leftover steel and built a platform on which to set the hopper. He then scavenged an electric motor from a small compressor that was being thrown out and refurbished a hydraulic motor and tank that had been in the 2008 flood.

“It was just a matter of finding what I wanted and sticking it together,” Blakely says.

An end loader drops sand into the hopper just like it would if a city truck was heading out to sand streets in the winter. The sandbag-machine operator then places an empty sandbag underneath, pulls a lever and a predetermined and uniform amount of sand fills the bag to the desired level. The bag drops to a conveyor and the bag passes by a sewing machine where the bag's top is sewn shut. A couple of streets crew workers then grab the bags and place them on a waiting pallet.

The contraption doesn't eliminate labor or magically build sandbag walls. But it cuts down on the number of workers needed, changes what they do and creates sandbags of uniform size so they can be packed in place to better seal out water. It also reduces worker injuries and lessens the need for hundreds of volunteers to descend on the city's garage to help out.

One of the basic improvements with the machine is that an end loader scoops sand and fills the hopper so workers and volunteers aren't shoveling sand into individual bags.

Blakely's sandbag-making machine can make 50 sandbags in four minutes, compared to the old way in which the number depended on how fast a worker could shovel.

“That made for a long day of shoveling,” said Duffy.

Cities in need

In a typical year, the city stockpiles about 12,000 loaded sandbags heading into spring, but this year had to make between 60,000 and 80,000 to protect against water backing up out of the sewers and to protect in low-lying areas.

Duffy estimates that the sandbag machine can free up 10 to 15 city workers to do other emergency tasks when a crisis calls for sandbags.

In this year's flood scare, the city set up old-fashioned citizen sandbag-filling operations at New Bohemia and Czech Village, but the thought in the future is to build a couple more of Blakely's machines and take them out into the neighborhoods the next time the Cedar River threatens the city. The city has loaned Duffy's machine to the city of Davenport twice.

Volunteers are great, says Duffy, but some of their sandbags can hold 50 or 60 or more pounds of sand, which can be hard to handle compared to the 35- to 40-pound ones that the city prefers and the machine spits out every time.

“If you throw 2,000 to 3,000 of them, you'll be real glad they weigh about 35 to 40 pounds and not 50 or more pounds,” he says.

Duffy says the sandbag machine is not surprise coming from Blakely.

He notes that Blakely found a way to attach a piece of scrap rubber to hoppers placed in city trucks during the winter so salt doesn't fall between the hopper and the truck box, rusting the truck box out. In another instance, Blakely figured out how to rearrange the brackets on snow plow wings so they can be raised in a way that reduces damage to the city garage and to utility poles and much else out on the streets.

“If you see Randy out there on the street, scratching his head and looking at it ... ,” Duffy says. “We just don't do things the way they've always been done.”

Another inventor

Another city of Cedar Rapids employee who has gained some notice at City Hall in the last year is Dennis Meyers, a water distribution supervisor in the Utilities Departments' Water Division.

Meyers came up with a gadget - an attachment to an auger unit - that has allowed the city to repair rather than replace 50 fire hydrants in need of a fix in the last two years. Before Meyers' idea, the city would have had to replace 50 percent of the problem hydrants. With his idea, it has only needed to replace four in the last two years, said Megan Murphy, the Utilities Department's communications director. The department, she said, calculates that Meyers' help has saved the city $70,150 in two years.

Unlike Meyers, Blakely's sandbag-making machine has not won second place in the “Gimmicks & Gadgets” competition put on by the American Water Works Association.

However, the city's Duffy says the Public Works Department is going to enter Blakely's work into a competition at a state transportation conference in September.

Blakely's inventiveness during the workday in the state's second-largest city doesn't mean that Blakely, who grew up in Palo and lives in Urbana, hasn't been on a farm and doesn't appreciate rural Iowa's reputation for inventiveness and creativity.

“I did a lot of work on farms when I was younger, and you didn't just run to town and get something,” he says. “Sometimes you needed it now, and so you made a way to make it work.”

Blakely, a 35-year city employee, said he doesn't have any inventions he's working on in his own garage shop at home, and he doesn't have thoughts of patents and millions of dollars in royalties on his mind.

“I've not thought about a patent,” he says. “If it makes my life easier and it makes the guys' lives easier, and it's safer and faster ...

“I've been kind of MacGyverish all my life. You take a roll of wire and a pair of pliers and you can do a lot of things. It's just something that's always been in me. I couldn't tell you where it came from. It's just wheels in the mind working.”