Earthbag Tornado Shelter

Earthbag tornado shelter under construction
Earthbag tornado shelter under construction

We always enjoy hearing about reader’s projects. A reader just sent me photos of their earthbag tornado shelter in Ohio. We’ve been encouraging earthbag storm shelters since the beginning of this blog, because they’re low cost, efficient, simple to build and can save lives. The links below explain in detail how they’re built.

“I wanted to show you a picture of the work in progress. It took us two summers to build by the way, we had lots of interruptions. We just made sure it was well covered when we weren’t working on it, and well secured for the winter that it didn’t have stucco on it and we didn’t have any problems doing it this way. We live in Southern Ohio so we will have to be very attentive at repairing any cracks due to the weather. We have one already that needs fixed. With the air flow inside the shelter and stucco on the outside hopefully it will dry out quickly if any moisture gets between the stucco and the bags. We will see how it goes.

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A Sustainable Life

Beautiful earthbag home near Asheville, North Carolina.
Beautiful earthbag home near Asheville, North Carolina.

“Hello friends. My name is Morgan Caraway. My better half Mary Jane and I built an earthbag house near Asheville, NC (some info about this technique at EarthbagBuilding.com), a cordwood bath house and recently completed an earthbag sunroom addition. We also built our own yurt, set up a rainwater system, built our own micro solar electric system and have learned a lot about sustainable living in general.

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Emergency Earthbag Shelters for Pakistan

Pakistan Relief: 40 earthbag emergency shelters for 400 people
Pakistan Relief: 40 earthbag emergency shelters for 400 people

Two clever examples out of many possible solutions.

“We ended 2005 with a project in the earthquake-stricken district of Bagh, Pakistan to provide Improvised All Weather Rapid Shelters (IRAS). Your strong funding of dZi this year has allow us to jump on this project with oversight from dear friends on the ground in Pakistan. Dr Neena Jain and her husband Bill Rohs are strong supporters of the dZi Foundation and were instrumental in helping us open our girl’s safe house in Sikkim, India. They are now volunteering for Austrian Aid International in Bagh for the next six months.

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New FAQ’s at Earthbagbuilding.com

The Frequently Asked Questions section of www.earthbagbuilding.com has been accumulating pertinent questions and answers for over a decade. These had been categorized into only about a half dozen pages, which had become overly long and cumbersome for finding specific information.  I finally decided to organize them in such a way that it is now much … Read more

YWAM Orlando’s Justice Department Earthbag Home


“YWAM (Youth With a Mission) Orlando’s Justice Department embarks on its first sustainable housing project – an Earthbag Home. Using resources that can be found almost anywhere, they are building a prototype on the campus. The hope is that, having learned to build this kind of house here, future teams can be trained in simple construction, then sent on outreach to take what they’ve learned to people who need it!”

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Farm Stay Earthbag Rentals

Wrong Way Home Farm Stay earthbag rental unit
Wrong Way Home Farm Stay earthbag rental unit

“In the next 3 or 4 months I hope to not only complete the aquaponics component of my project, but get one “model” farm stay unit completed (which I intend to test thoroughly by living in it myself for a while).

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