When acid rain starts to fall, mutant scorpions attack and marauding wackos try to eat your flesh you don’t want to find yourself holing up in a ramshackle farm house or an abandoned flat in NYC or London. You’re going to need a practical yet functional fortress to weather the decades of madness until the dove returns with the olive branch in its beak.
To build said fortress you’ll need to consider security, self-sustainability and endurance. The answer to all three is, you guessed it, hemcrete. (Start bugging your representatives to legalize the growing of hemp now, so you can start construction before the end comes.) Hemcrete is a bio-composite building material made by mixing specially prepared hemp shiv with a lime-based binder (Montana Hemp Council Magazine, Vol. 4, 2011).
Basically, this means hemcrete is made from cooked lime and ground up hemp stalks. But the result is as zombie proof, fire proof, mutant bug proof, bullet proof, mohawk proof dwelling. Hemcrete has both great thermal properties and great insulative properties. So when the ozone layer cooks off and the surface of the earth is left prey to the vagaries of our new catastrophic weather systems, your new anti-armageddon compound will keep you cozy and dry in winter and cool in summer.
While hemcrete can be mixed and poured by hand much like concrete, it’s easier to build a family compound from the stuff with the use of modern equipment. So I recommend getting the bulk of the project completed before our infrastructure collapses. It works great either poured into forms or blown in (against a single wall form). Cover both sides with a lime/sand plaster and those virus-ravaged mutants can gnaw away at your walls for months straight and still do more damage to their face than the structure.
Other key architectural elements which should be considered include: high and narrow windows mostly on the Southern and Eastern sides of your house; a perimeter hemcrete wall high enough to slow marauders down but not too high to prevent you from seeing over; solar and wind generators; an underground propane or natural gas tank; composting toilets, a rocket stove and possible a bomb shelter/panic room. Consider embedding the exterior of your wall and even home with shards of broken glass to discourage climbing. And I would recommend a thickness of at least two feet.[divider]
To get started right away I recommend contacting ALT (American Lime Technology) to see if they can deliver hemcrete to your area. The best part is that you may be staving off the apocalypse with this choice of building material.
I just saw something online saying the NASA satellite plummeting towards earth could trigger a zombie apocalypse. So it may be too late for hemcrete. Batten down the hatches!
It would make an awesome video to see how a block Hempcrete would stand-up to modern rifle rounds…5.56, 7.62×51, 7,62×39 etc.
That would make an interesting bit. For comparison it would be nice to throw in some regular cinder blocks and maybe some concrete sips… alas, I’ll have to wait for someone else to put it all together. Any takers out there?
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