Commercial Doomsday Shelters

[Combat Controller]

Glad to see the Teamsters are paying the reps enough they can waste cash on frivolous crap.

First guy there will lock everyone else out. The kind of person who buys an expensive time share strikes me as venal enough to try that.

[Jericho941]

First guy there will lock everyone else out. The kind of person who buys an expensive time share strikes me as venal enough to try that.

I remember reading an article post-9/11 about stores selling equipment to help escape high rises in New York. One store owner mentioned a corporate bigwig in an office with dozens of employees that bought himself a really nice kit complete with a parachute with his corporate card. Just for him, though.

[442nd Dinochrome]

The company is starting with a 13,000-square-foot refurbished underground shelter formerly operated by the U.S. government at an undisclosed location near Barstow, Calif., that will have room for 134 people, he says.

The interior shot of the shelter in that article looked mighty familiar; it could be the control-dome
of one of those underground Titan missile bases that were for sale a while back on E-Bay.

Back in the 1960's, there were hundreds of unsold backyard shelters stored in a field near the
Orange Show grounds in San Bernardino. They looked like rusting boilers with steel entrance
tunnels sticking up like smokestacks. My guess is that they all got scrapped in the seventies.

[SeekHer]

Back in the late 1960s my in-laws built one but they live in twister/wind tunnel/tornado country.

They got hold of a semi trailer reefer box, IIRC 34' long, and they changed the split doors with a different locking system (inside only), dug a trench wide enough but much longer to bury the container completely, laid down pea gravel for drainage, covered it over with the dirt, compacted it and planted over it with grass seed...This was well before the cargo container craze.

They covered above the doors with a couple of buried small I beams and put corrugated aluminium sheeting on them and then covered it all with the compacted, planted earth to act like a porch. covered vestibule area (where the generator sits) and had stairs installed so they could walk down into the box and ride out the storms.

It had two sets of bunk beds, a kitchen table and some odd chairs, a sofa, TV and VCR, stereo radio, shelves with canned and dry goods, extra clothing and there was a Coleman camp stove with a vent above to cook with and a small bar fridge...At the rear was a vented chemical toilet behind some old office cubicle screens...They had electricity from a buried cable from the house and there was always some large aluminium or plastic casks filled with water...They installed a couple of those tube skylights when they cam out in the late 1980s to get some natural light inside.

They would use it a few times each and every year they lived there.

If you have the room on your land they make very cheap extra buildings...I've seen cargo containers being used as root cellars, potting sheds, storm shelters, workshops, chicken coops and garages...In certain parts of the country, buried, they would almost be a necessity as storm shelters! Someone here (HTRN?) posted a picture of one being used as a hunting blind mounted on some poles like a tree or tripod stand.

I grew up during the nuclear scare and watched for Russian planes when Kennedy issued his Cuban Missile Crises and watched Nikita bash his shoe on the dais...Back then they were called (Backyard or Underground) Nuclear or Missile or Air Raid Shelters.

[Evyl Robot]

Vicino, who launched the Vivos project last December, says he seeks buyers willing to pay $50,000 for adults and $25,000 for children.

The company is starting with a 13,000-square-foot refurbished underground shelter formerly operated by the U.S. government at an undisclosed location near Barstow, Calif., that will have room for 134 people, he says.

Vicino puts the average cost for a shelter at $10 million.

Am I having trouble with my math or what? Average cost for the shelter is $10 million. At $50K/adult [strike]sucker[/strike] customer, that would take 200 adults to at least break even, right? But, there's only room for 134 people. That's going to need to be at least a 2:1 overbooking to be profitable. Is that gross pessimism on how many of their customers will be able to make it to the shelter, or is it simply a scam in general? It kind of makes me feel ill. I imagine the clientele are the same types that have their heads cryogenically frozen so they can be reanimated someday when there's a cure for the disease that already killed them.

[Whirlibird]

Can't say much for the commercial products but around here tornado shelters aka root cellars are fairly common.

Something to be said about the "ol fraidy hole".

I'm planning on putting in a fairly good sized one when we add onto the house in a couple of years. Nothing that the 5 of us could live in for a year but make it through the night if needed as I am in tornado alley.
Plus it'll be storage for my camping/scouting stuff.