[url]http://www.usatoday.com/news/nation/2010-07-28-doomsday28_ST_N.htm?loc=interstitialskip[/url]
[release]Jason Hodge, father of four children from Barstow, Calif., says he's "not paranoid" but he is concerned, and that's why he bought space in what might be labeled a doomsday shelter.
Hodge bought into the first of a proposed nationwide group of 20 fortified, underground shelters — the Vivos shelter network — that are intended to protect those inside for up to a year from catastrophes such as a nuclear attack, killer asteroids or tsunamis, according to the project's developers.
"It's an investment in life," says Hodge, a Teamsters union representative. "I want to make sure I have a place I can take me and my family if that worst-case scenario were to happen."
There are signs that underground shelters, almost-forgotten relics of the Cold War era, are making a comeback.
The Vivos network, which offers partial ownerships similar to a timeshare in underground shelter communities, is one of several ventures touting escape from a surface-level calamity.
Radius Engineering in Terrell, Texas, has built underground shelters for more than three decades, and business has never been better, says Walton McCarthy, company president.
The company sells fiberglass shelters that can accommodate 10 to 2,000 adults to live underground for one to five years with power, food, water and filtered air, McCarthy says.
The shelters range from $400,000 to a $41 million facility Radius built and installed underground that is suitable for 750 people, McCarthy says. He declined to disclose the client or location of the shelter.
"We've doubled sales every year for five years," he says.Other shelter manufacturers include Hardened Structures of Colorado and Utah Shelter Systems, which also report increased sales.
The shelters have their critics. Ken Rose, a history professor at California State University-Chico and author of One Nation Underground: The Fallout Shelter in American Culture, says underground shelters were a bad idea a half-century ago and they're a bad idea now.
"A terrorist with a nuke in a suitcase pales in comparison to what the Cold War had to offer in the 1950s and '60s, which was the potential annihilation of the human race," he says.
Steve Davis, president of Maryland-based All Hands Global Emergency Management Consulting, also is skeptical.
All Hands has helped more than 100 public and private sector clients with emergency management and homeland security services, according to its website.
The types of cataclysms envisioned by some shelter manufacturers "are highly unlikely compared to what we know is going to happen," Davis says.
"We know there is going to be a major earthquake someday on the West Coast. We know a hurricane is going to hit Florida, the Gulf Coast, the East Coast," he says. "We support reasonable preparedness. We don't think it's necessary to burrow into the desert."
The Vivos network is the idea of Del Mar, Calif., developer Robert Vicino.
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.
Vivos plans for facilities as large as 100,000 square feet, says real estate broker Dan Hotes of Seattle, who over the past four years has collaborated with Vicino on a project involving partial ownership of high-priced luxury homes and is now involved with Vivos.
Catastrophe shelters today may appeal to those who seek to bring order to a world full of risk and uncertainty, says Alexander Riley, an associate professor of sociology at Bucknell University in Lewisburg, Pa.
"They're saying, 'I can control everything,' " Riley says. " 'With the right amount of rational planning, I can even survive an asteroid hitting the Earth that causes a dust cloud like the kind we believe wiped the dinosaurs out.' "
The Vivos website features a clock counting down to Dec. 21, 2012, the date when the ancient Mayan "Long Count" calendar marks the end of a 5,126-year era, at which time some people expect an unknown apocalypse.
Vicino, whose terravivos.com website lists 11 global catastrophes ranging from nuclear war to solar flares to comets, bristles at the notion he's profiting from people's fears.
"You don't think of the person who sells you a fire extinguisher as taking advantage of your fear," he says. "The fact that you may never use that fire extinguisher doesn't make it a waste or bad.
"We're not creating the fear; the fear is already out there. We're creating a solution."[/release]
:tinfoil:
Well, it's good to build downwards instead of upwards for a change. If you look at all the high-rise buildings we have nowadays, they are so easy to destroy in the event of war. Send a squadron of bombers over a city filled with skyscrapers, and all those towers would simply crumble. But if you have the majority of a city under the ground, the damage caused by the bombers would only affect the surface and structures close to it.
We've been too focused on building upwards in the last century, whereas we really should be building downwards, since there's WAY more space underground, and there's always the ever-present potential for secrets to be unearthed.
[QUOTE=ironman17;23684684] and there's always the ever-present potential for secrets to be unearthed.[/QUOTE]
like my dead cat.
I want a doomsday shelter.
Like right in my backyard.
That would be awesome.
When I buy my house its just going to one of those old silos.
It sure seems interesting, it's a nice gimmicky way to make money.
Reminds of the fallout shelter some guy made out of school buses, in one of the penn and teller bullshit episodes.
[QUOTE=Sharq;23684728]like my dead cat.[/QUOTE]
Well, that and the remains of unrecorded cultures and species. We've barely scratched the surface, there's so many things we haven't found yet, buried in the deep rocks and soils of the planet. Hell, for all we know, the entire African continent could be riddled with a network of cavernous subterranean cities, remnants of some long-lost ancient culture immensely superior to ours. Not to mention the remains of all sorts of species of dinosaurs and shog- I mean fishes.
Seriously, there's just so much that could possibly be beneath the surface, but we don't know because we haven't been far enough down. Same principle applies to the sea. There's just too much we haven't found yet, so much we might've missed or not even known about. If more people start building downwards, the chances of finding something revolutionary may increase by quite a bit. You just have to keep digging. I mean, we've landed on the moon, travelled into the inky blackness beyond our atmosphere, and yet we've barely dug down to a maximum of 12 kilometers circa 1989. (I honestly find this shameful of humanity, a real negative mark on our reputation to have only achieved such a dispicably-shallow depth and not even thought of going any deeper, especially since we likely have better technology to work with in this timeframe)
[img]http://www.xbitlabs.com/images/video/fallout3/Votf.jpg[/img]
[editline]01:08PM[/editline]
Oh, don't forget some extra water chips!
Vivos = Vault-tec?
Yeah I always wondered if we weren't the first civilization on the earth. What I think we should do is look back to the fossil record and try to determine if there was any nuclear catastrophe or evidence of industrialization, or something. Who knows what we might find.
I'm pretty sure we would have found some evidence of a nuclear war in some antartic ice cores to be honest.
[QUOTE=Xystus234;23686056]Yeah I always wondered if we weren't the first civilization on the earth. What I think we should do is look back to the fossil record and try to determine if there was any nuclear catastrophe or evidence of industrialization, or something. Who knows what we might find.[/QUOTE]
The radiation would've coagulated into some form of storage, be it trees or the ground, or trapped in water, ice etc.
Wow, I looked at Radius Engineering's website, I expected it to just be some cheesy cold-war style tin cans in the ground, they bunkers they make are pretty awesome, not going to lie. They've got one with an actual house built inside a giant dome, complete with astro-turf front and back yards.
[quote=Radius Engineering] The Oparus configuration is an Earthcom 32 with 6 arches and a conventional house inside the structure. The house can have a front and backyard with LED lights illuminating the walls of the arches. The electrical power is generated by two 6 KW diesel generators connected to a 5,000 to 10,000 gallon diesel tank. This configuration has a spiral stairwell and a secondary exit and is serviced by an MCAS 120/600 NBC air filtration system. Green Eye Tech, under a separate contract, can erect the house inside this structure.
[img]http://www.bomb-shelter.net/EC32-6%20house.jpg[/img][/quote]
Now that's a bomb shelter lol.
Edit: The best protection you can get, denial. Lol
Damn man, whatever happened to bare bones shelters?
With fancy pants one there's so much shit that can go wrong.
I've actually thought it'd be really cool to have a house underground. If you had an inconspicuous entrance, you'd never get robbed, as long it was out of the way.
[b]EDIT:[/b] Should've read more of the OP.
[QUOTE=ironman17;23684684]-stuff-[/QUOTE]
Sure, it'd be great to build downward, but the digging would cost quite a bit of money. If you built straight down, I suppose the walls would be a natural support though.
When I can afford it, I'm totally buying space in one of these. For myself.
I don't want to die slowly from nuclear radiation.
:ohdear:
[QUOTE=Xystus234;23686056]Yeah I always wondered if we weren't the first civilization on the earth. What I think we should do is look back to the fossil record and try to determine if there was any nuclear catastrophe or evidence of industrialization, or something. Who knows what we might find.[/QUOTE]
what REALLY happened to the dinosaurs
[QUOTE=Nifae;23686557]When I can afford it, I'm totally buying space in one of these. For myself.
I don't want to die slowly from nuclear radiation.
:ohdear:[/QUOTE]
Actually radiation ain't that bad in the aftermath of modern nuclear warheads.
It's the radioactive dust and water that fucks you up :v:
[quote]A terrorist with a nuke in a suitcase[/quote]
Because they are all the rage!
[QUOTE=Simples;23687288]Because they are all the rage![/QUOTE]
The USSR used to have a lot of them.
They reported a little while back somewhere between 10 - 100 (can't remember the exact figures) had gone missing and couldn't be found anywhere.
The USSR when it collapsed lost a lot of their military materials and they ended up in the hands of terrorists.
This isn't all that far fetched man.
I am reminded of this:
[IMG]http://img.photobucket.com/albums/v215/Glaber/embr.png[/IMG]
More so the book than the movie.
[QUOTE=Glaber;23687517]I am reminded of this:
[IMG]http://img.photobucket.com/albums/v215/Glaber/embr.png[/IMG]
More so the book than the movie.[/QUOTE]
The book is always better.
[QUOTE=Lambeth;23687632]The book is always better.[/QUOTE]
Twilight.
Both were shit, the book was worse. Although the movie incited fucking teenage anarchy.
I can imagine these becoming a deep seeded market.
[QUOTE=ExplodingGuy;23688698]I can imagine these becoming a deep seeded market.[/QUOTE]
:golfclap:
I see what you did there and I'm fond of it.
Hell, I've been doing this for years. I have an obsession with the apocalypse. Zombie apocalypse, Nuclear apocalypse. Any of that. In high school, I carried around a large canvas messenger bag with various survival stuff in it. I still have it, I just got a better one that I carry around now. I took a course in architectural engineering just for the purposes of designing my own fallout shelter. I suppose I come by it naturally. My grandmother still has stockpiles of food and water. She bought her house specifically because it has a fallout shelter under it where she keeps it all. The worst part is that she calls it her "War Room". My dad was and still is a fan of the Fallout games and the apocalypse.
Crazy? Possibly. Paranoid? Yeah. But hey, my policy is to be prepared for any possibility. Better safe than dead.
Carrying around survival shit is a bit far though ain't it man?
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