The greatest need for housing in Nepal is in poor rural villages. Not only can they not afford cement and steel, it’s not practical to carry these heavy materials 1-2 days over mountain passes. We need to identify the most practical low cost earthbag building methods and create a document showing best practices.
reinforced earthbag
Earthbag Building Nepal Radio Interview
Namaste Nepal Radio Show interview of Owen Geiger and Vava Pragya, the earthbag workshop coordinator who’s playing a pivotal role in organizing the training in Nepal. Interview starts at 2:20. Commercial breaks about 14:00-22:00 and 32:00-39:10.
Summary of Earthquake Resistant Earthbag Building Methods
We’ve posted quite a few blog posts over the years about how to reinforce earthbag buildings. Due to the earthquake in Nepal, we’re getting lots of questions about reinforced earthbag methods for earthquake regions. The following list will save people lots of time searching our blog and websites. Watch for more news on this topic in the future.
Earthbag Wall Bracing Overview
Our sister site, Earthbag Structures.com, has lots of good information about building with earthbags in disaster prone areas. Click on the link to read the full article. This blog post is just a summary.
Earthbag Fence Columns
From Ginger at I’d Rather Be… Pursuing an Off-Grid Life: “We are planning to build a fence at the new place. I had an idea for an earthbag/sheet metal fence, and an earthbag/conduit fence. I want to consider earthbag pillars with corrugated sheet metal in between the pillars where privacy is needed. I want to … Read more
Reinforcing Steel Recommended Instead of Buttresses
This is another major announcement courtesy of Structure1.com. Instead of building buttresses, which tend to be time consuming and difficult to design correctly for earthquake zones, they recommend using the same specifications we reported earlier for reinforced earthbag walls in seismic regions. The comments below are from the latest email exchange with Structure1.com. Refer to: … Read more