Cob: the rest of the Flooded Cob story

[billc_lists at greenbuilder.com]

(oops.  meant to send this to the whole list.  Sorry about the 
duplicate, Ocean!)

What I know about it:

The project was at Rainbow Ranch, just south of Austin TX.  The 
property is owned by a local enviro nonprofit, if I remember 
correctly.  For those of you who have never experienced a flood in 
Texas, they're pretty dang impressive and we've had several "100 year 
floods" in the past decade.  Suburbanization?  Global Warming?  Bad 
calculations of the100 year flood plain?  Hard to say, probably a 
combination.   The most impressive in recent memory was 7" of rain in 
one hour, dumped in an urban watershed in 1980.  There were many 
floating cars that day.

The two people I know of who were directly involved in organizing the 
construction of the demonstration cob building were (Dr.) Yvonne 
Hansen (yvonhansen at yahoo.com) and architect Gayle Borst 
(gayle at stewardshiparchitecture.com), should anyone want to research 
it further.

I suspect that the owners of the property were the ones who insisted 
on that location. Both Yvonne and Gayle usually have better sense 
than that, IMHO.



>This turns out to be one of Ianto's favorite morality tales:
>
>The person asked Ianto to build the house, but he said that they 
>shouldn't build in the floodplain.  The person insisted, saying it 
>was only a "hundred-year-flood".  So reluctantly Ianto helped them 
>build a beautiful cob house, which Ianto still includes pictures of 
>in his slideshows.  Well, the next year along came the hundred year 
>flood!  Away went the cob house!  Ianto sometimes includes the 
>"after" pictures in his show, and it's not pretty.
>
>Turns out I'm in a similar situation here with the restaurant!  We 
>are in the Willamette River floodplain, and locals remember VW buses 
>floating down Highway 99 back in the great flood of the 1970's.  But 
>here we just have a garden wall which might fail, and which we can 
>also rebuild even though it's 130 feet long.  Repairing the 
>restaurant after a flood is another story!
>
>Ocean
>
>
>On Tuesday, July 9, 2002, at 06:21 PM, Charmaine R Taylor wrote:
>
>>Apearantly someone (here in the U.S) built a cob home on a
>>floodplain, and sure enough, it flooded a couple of years after
>>completion.  Even with  four feet (a bit more than a meter) of
>>standing water, it stood for almost four days before collapsing.
>>___________________
>>
>>This was the cob demonstration bldg. I believe built in TX...not sure
>>where, someone else may know. It was washed away in a big flood that
>>year, and someone I spoke with ( a woman Dr. as I recall) had worked on
>>it and had sent me  photos a few years ago.
>>
>>Ms. Charmaine  Taylor/ Taylor Publishing
>>http://www.dirtcheapbuilder.com
>>http://www.papercrete.com
>>PO Box 375, Cutten CA 95534
>>707-441-1632

-- 
Bill Christensen
billc at greenbuilder.com

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