Affordable and Sustainable Wildfire-Resistant Housing

Our research team is developing a house prototype made of earth blocks, which are obtained by mixing soil, cement, and water. This material can make a house incredibly resistant to earthquakes, hurricanes, tornadoes, and wildfires. Wildfires in California run rampant every year, so we hope to replace traditional houses with non-combustible homes. We will use the crowdfunding donations to perform a demonstration of the performance of our house under severe wildfire conditions. We are raising money to buy materials, pay students to build an earth block house prototype and a comparable wooden house, and cover the expenses to test this prototype under simulated wildfire conditions. 

Our ultimate goal is to save lives and homes, which would be otherwise lost to fires, by demonstrating a new sustainable, affordable, and fire-resistant housing technology. We need your help to fund this demo, which will be used to propose this new technology to the State and local building officials in California. This project could change the way houses are built in California, the US, and around the world. In California, over 80% of houses are made out of wood and more than 30% of those houses are located in the Wildland Urban Interface (WUI); thus, they are at high risk of being destroyed by wildfires.

We believe that a full-scale demonstration will attract the attention and support of the state, government, and local officials, which is necessary to expand this construction technology’s accessibility. We have tested our material in the lab and we are excited to test earth block construction on a larger scale to make it available to everyone who wants a beautiful, inexpensive, ecological home that is also wildfire-proof!