[Cob] great article???

[Barbara Roemer]

I disagree with Ocean.  Earth buildings have a very spotty history in
seismic zones.  With particular waves, they are deadly.  To get any cob
structures through CA code, or any other spot with seismic considerations,
it will take some kind of cohesive exoskeleton or internal web, something
much more continuous than the straw in cob.  It is true that adobe bricks
crack both at the joints and within the bricks.  That's why unreinforced
adobe is no longer code approved in most states.  In the same way that bale
builders in seismic zones have worked their way from internal pinning with
rebar to external pinning with bamboo and other materials, or to netting
with very strict protocols to withstand shake table testing that simulates
powerful quakes, cob will have to follow suit.

Barbara in a quake zone.


Ocean wrote, in part:
>Adobe brick structures are weak, because the building is made of individually
dried bricks mortared with clay slip - lots of
> joints which shake and fall apart when the big earthquake hits.
> 
> Cob, on the other hand (which we should be experts on - "cob-listers")
> is a monolithic structure with thousands or millions of strands of
> straw running throughout in a randomized matrix, hence the lack of any
> joints which can crack under shear force...