We’re very happy to hear of a project in Pakistan for 100 earthbag houses. The text below has been pieced together from the Pakwheels forum.
Parova is 30 km from Dera Ismial Khan, badly effected from recent flood & now we are building the latest & economic free cost houses for them with the support of Pakistan Army, donors, Team leader Mr Sajid & backup support of 4×4 Engaged & Saj Engineering. The team has a project to make 100 sand bag homes with two 12×12 rooms in each house. This is Canadian design.
Why janj and sajid sb’s team working there? Well, because of security reasons large NGOs have just dropped off a few tents to the affected areas and ran out of there.
The construction: Well its a pretty straight forward design based on a badminton court layout, but the ground has to be dug to 2 feet and leveled back to have a flat surface, otherwise the sandbag walls will tilt and a single cm out would destroy the whole alignment so excavators, tractor trolleys and compaction equipment is involved to have the thing done – not so easy now. The raw materials are sand (soil), jute bags, iron barbed wire. One house requires between 600 to 800 sand bags.
Dear Patti stouter , i am looking for volunteer which can help to design and construct sand bag houses for flood affected and earth quick affected.
i am a young volunteer appeal for consultancy to build this kind of houses in pakistan
Somehow I missed this post. I’d love to hear from these people how it’s going. I’d like to help those in flooded areas of Pakistan. I hope they are able to use some culturally appropriate shapes as they begin rebuilding.
For regions subject to flooding sand bags can be made much more stable with some included aggregate.
1″ shells that interlock, used 50% in fill create a much more stable bag than pure sand alone. I suspect sturdy plastic trash or large chunks of stone or rubble will do the same.
I also suspect that this aggregate only needs to be included in the central third of a bag to effectively prevent the bag slumping that tends to happen with pure sand.
Anyone have any experience with this?
It would be good to contact them and explain how to make some test bags. They may have adequate clay in their soil. Hard to tell. Or maybe there’s a clay source nearby.