![]() ![]() This way a wall several hundred feet long can be in place in minutes and finished in a day. There is a new system of set up where the barriers are loaded in the back of trailer and dropped out in a line, a few people following behind set up them up and the loader filling them. They can essentially work ten times faster than crews filling sandbags. One soldier operating a front end loader and four more unfolding the shells can set up a wall in just couple of hours. It is not instantaneous, but the speed that it can be set up in is pretty impressive. Get it flown in or pull it off a truck, unfold it, use a front end loader or other heavy equipment to fill it up with dirt, sand or gravel. One of the best features of the the HESCO is the ease in which it is set up. Protecting the most important part of the base The Hesco comes in several sizes, dimensions of typical configurations are 4’6” x 3’6” x 32’ to 7’ x 5’ x 100’. The are shipped collapsed and weigh very little. They are very cheap and can be assembled by people with little or no training. They can be stacked two or three high and make a formidable barrier for weapons. The HESCO first began to be used in the security context in the 1990s. In general use, they are often simply called Hescos. HESCO is actually the name of the company that produces it. The real name of the product is the " Concertainer" playing on the classic concertina wire barrier. The name comes from the British company that invented them more than 10 years ago. They are made up of a collapsible wire mesh "wall" with a thick synthetic fabric liner. Today they are used on almost every US and NATO base in Iraq and Afghanistan. In 2008, during the extensive flooding in the Midwest, 27,000 feet of HESCO barriers were shipped to Iowa and set up. They were used to reinforce levees after Hurricane Katrina. This is the HESCO Bastion, originally designed as a temporary or semi-permanent flood control structure. You can only fill so many sand bags in a given period and if you are trying to fortify a large FOB or airbase, it would take a real long time. This worked okay from a protection point of view, but was extremely labor intensive. Classically, soldiers hand filled sand bags for use as protective fortifications. There is a great need to make bases relatively safe, especially from small arms, grenades, and rockets, as well as the shrapnel of other weapons like mortars. What is known as the HESCO barrier or HESCO bastion is quite possibly one of the simplest and most effective systems in use today by the military. From the extremely high tech world of rockets, missiles, and space flight, we will now take a turn for the primitive. ![]()
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