Hello, I came across your site on straw bale building and wonder if you can share your knowledge about the feasibility of building straw bale temp shelters for those braving the cold in North Dakota and Iowa to stop the Dakota pipeline. Please let me know as soon as you can. Warmly, Damita
Emergency Shelter
Rebuilding Nepal, One Earthbag at a Time
Rebuilding Nepal, One Earthbag at a Time is a short Kindle book assembled by a team of eight volunteers who went to Palchok in the Trishuli Valley to rebuild a school in the fall of 2015. Because of the remote location they needed to plan for every aspect of the project, and this book is primarily advice for others who might try to do something similar. Besides actually building the school, they wanted to introduce the earthbag technique to the villagers so they could continue rebuilding this way. The team had raised enough funds from friends and family to accomplish this goal. They were there for only two weeks, but they got that small school built! Graeme Howell was the mastermind behind this endeavor.
The first chapter introduces what they consider to be the essential building process and suggests how to make this happen efficiently. Because of the number of volunteers, including folks from the village, they wanted to keep everybody busy and make sure there weren’t bottlenecks in the process. For this reason they had people filling and sewing bags right away, even before the foundation trench was prepared. Likewise, they had people screening soil for the eventual plaster.
Building Earthbag Tornado Shelters for Profit
In a previous blog post about Earthbag Tornado Shelters I suggested building them for profit. Four years later the same advice is still valid. The marketing process should be even easier now since earthbag buildings are much more common. One key selling point is the cost. Most commercially available tornado shelters cost at least several thousand dollars. The materials cost for earthbag tornado shelters is around $300. That means almost pure profit for the builder.
Gabion Beams for Earthquake Resilience
I met Randolph Langenbach at the Natural Building Colloquium in New Mexico a few weeks ago, and was in the audience when this video was being recorded. Randolph has taken the original footage and enhanced it with many extra images, so that it is really better than it was the first time. I think the … Read more
Transitional Earthbag Shelters in Syria
The United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) has launched a test project for temporary shelters made from bags filled with earth in Syria. The architect, Anas Aljbain, is using ARCHICAD to develop the designs.