Tag Archives: bunkers

Article -‘Built by preppers for preppers’: See this Wisconsin compound built for off-the-grid lifestyles

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Set on a dead-end road with vantage points, a shooting range, gardens, apple trees and plenty of lumber, Allen says it would be well suited for someone who wants to be prepared to go off the grid.

“Obviously it relates- it makes a lot of sense now with the way that some people feel about the current state, you know, that we’re in,” Allen said. “The way that it’s built and constructed, it probably would cater to so called ‘preppers’ nowadays.”

Kinda sweet. Someone spent some good money to put this thing together. I rather like the idea of earth-sheltered homes but I always wonder about the long-term waterproofness of such things. I think I’d be more interested in earth-bermed homes. Kinda like those ammunition bunkers where they bulldoze berms on all sides.

Anyway, places like these are always interesting to look at, unfortunately the attention sales like this receive kinda negates a lot of the advantage of a place like this.

This one gets the Harder Homes & Gardens tag.

H/T to the person who emailed me about this.

Surreal estate: $2m bunker

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In all fairness, this is one of the more nice bunker conversions I’ve seen. But, still, two million bucks is a lot of money. On the other hand, you can ride out a lot of apocalypse in this thing….

Originally constructed in the 1960s at a cost of $4.5 million, an equivalent value today exceeding $34 million, this bunker represents the pinnacle of security and resilience.Its features include formidable 2.5-foot-thick concrete walls, additional layers of earth, EMP-resistant copper shielding, & 2 massive 3,000 pound blast doors.

Inside, the bunker has been meticulously transformed into a luxurious living space spanning two levels.It boasts a modern kitchen, two bathrooms, a spacious living room, and adaptable bedroom arrangements . Complementing these features are amenities such as a gym, a soundproof music studio with recording facilities, a theater room complete with a pool table, an expansive glass blowing studio, and a generous recreation area with soaring 16-foot high ceilings.

One of its standout attributes is self-sufficiency, with a private water well, a new pump, and a substantial 10,000-gallon stainless steel water storage tank, all seamlessly connected to an Aquasana Water Filtration System.The bunker is equipped with an emergency escape hatch and a towering 177-ft communication tower.

It’s cool, no two ways about it. But I’m loathe to live a life where sewage has to be pumped up…I think I’d prefer an above-ground earth-bermed bunker just to avoid having to fight gravity on things like that.

Filed under Harder Homes And Gardens…

Link – Descend Into Great Britain’s Network of Secret Nuclear Bunkers

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An interesting article about Britain’s collection of now-disused-and-abandoned bunkers from the Cold War. I’m always fascinated by these types of articles because, in true Jerry Ahern fashion, I’ve always not-so-secretly longed for a hidden bunker out in the middle of nowhere.

We’re standing in a room buried 10 feet below the North Yorkshire moors in northeast England, near the village of Castleton. The wind howls over the hatch above our heads as Hanlon—no expert, just an enthusiast—describes how the room would have been used, as an outpost of English civility and resourcefulness in the face of a nuclear attack. This bunker is one of hundreds just like it, scattered across the country. They’re no longer in use, having been decommissioned for decades, but they’re a nationwide network of relics of fear—a fear that seems never to have left.

The closest thing I’ve ever come across in regards to something like this is an old AT&T fortified microwave relay station in Whitehall MT that I looked at about twenty years ago. It had walls a foot thicj, blast shielding around the vents, and a wonderful flat-topped tower to emplace a .50. Didn’t get it, but there are many of them still out there now in private hands.

Someday I’ll probably just put a cargo container on a slab, encase it in concrete, and call it good. But until then, articles like these give me ideas.

Concrete Lego

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I freakin’ love the idea of these.

Of course, I could see a couple problems. First, unless you’ve got some lovely earthmoving equipment at your disposal, moving these things by yourself or with just one or two trusted friends is going to be difficult. Then there’s the matter of having enough concrete on hand….a wheelbarrow and shovel, or a portable mixer from the tool rental place, ain’t gonna do it. And then theres the matter of time…if you can only afford one mould, its going to take..what? days…for one block to dry and cure. And when you may need hundreds of blocks…well, thats a lot of time.

I suppose you could buy the mould and make a deal with a local concrete supplier. Give him the mould(s) and as him to make you as many blocks as you need. But, then you’re still locked into the transport and privacy issues.

A smaller version of these might make more sense. I sure do like the idea, though, of concrete Lego. Just the things for building outbuildings and that sort of thing. And probably make excellent anti-vehicle barriers for the perimeter of the property.

Cool idea, lotsa potential. Logistics is a bit tricky though.

When PerSec fails in a big way

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So, you have a very expensive but lovely home with a hidden doomsday bunker. And…you list it on online brokerages. What could possibly go wrong? Well, someone might think they want your bunker and they want it now.

Detective Allen testified that in the interview, Gilday confirmed that the bunker in the family’s home was his target, and that he had surveilled the property multiple times, even trying to access the bunker from a tunnel, prior to February 22nd.

So this guy thinks that WW3 is about to cut loose and decides he needs this bunker and doesn’t want to deal with realtors fees, I guess. So, he goes in, guns blazing, and decides to just…take the place.

We talk about PerSec all the time in the sense that when things get ‘spicy’ the people who know about your goodies might come a-calling and they may be less than polite. Heck, its the foundation of one of the Twilight Zone’s most famous episodes.

Moral of the story: the first rule of bunker club………….

Article – Raven Rock Author Tells Us How Our Government Plans For Its Own Annihilation

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I never get tired of hearing these stories about massive underground bunkers. Go about 1/3 of the way through the article to a YouTube tour of the Greenbrier (aka Project Greek Island).

Over the course of the Cold War, the U.S. government built a massive crescent of continuity of government facilities or sorts. These included elaborate communication sites, personnel bunkers, and command and control posts, ranging from southern Pennsylvania all the way to North Carolina.

Make no mistake, there are dozens of these facilities still out there.Certainly some are kept at a state of operational readiness. Some might even be part of those TREETOP teams.  For those of you who read some of the atrocious ‘survivialist’ fiction of the 90’s, the concept of networks of secret .gov doomsday bunkers and caches was a staple of the ‘Guardians’ series as well as the ‘Deathlands’ series. (Both series, by the way, were entertaining up to a point..that point was usually about 10-15 sequels in before that lack of new ideas would give way to absolutely outlandish changes to previously established fundamentals of the series.)

What is really awesome is that sometimes these ‘decommissioned’ facilities come up for sale to the general public. There’s a big difference between buying an old missile silo and buying a palce that was built, from the ground up, as a place to survive Armageddon.

Realistically, though… unless you hit the Powerball or have an appointment with a bible on Jan 20 in DC, you’re probably never gonna have your own underground nuke-proof city. But…you can always build your own if you’ve the determination.

Tiny house? Nah…tiny *bunker*

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I understand the appeal, a bit, of the whole ‘tiny house’ thing. You’re small enough to be exempt from many building codes, there’s a modicum of portability, it has an “I’m a minimalist’ vibe, and it’s usually cheaper than a real house. Downsides, of course, are the enormous lack of storage, plumbing is often not much better than what you’d get in an RV, and it’s not something that I can imagine anyone wanting to live in full-time. It’d be like a nicely appointed jail cell.

However…I can see an appeal where a hardened, fortified tiny house might make a nice little bolt-hole. Small enough to hide nestled in the gully or trees of a remote piece of property, but ‘full service’ enough to get you back on your feet after two weeks of hoofing it with just the clothes on your back across the post-apocalypse landscape. It would be a …tiny bunker?

Ok, let’s throw ‘tiny bunker’ into google and see what we get.

I suppose it depends on your definition of bunker, but a nice little fortified ‘cabin’ of tiny-house proportions tucked away somewhere unobtrusively might make a very nice fallback plan for when you have to beat feet.After all, if you have to flee for your lives to your Beta Site you really arent going to care that it’s only a hundred or so sq. ft. All youre gonna care about is that it has lights, food, weapons, meds, comms, and distance.

Given the ‘OMG this is it!’ attitude going on right now, I bet a ‘tiny bunker’ manufacturer could easily make quite a splash in the tiny house marketplace which has lost its luster as people realize it isn’t the minimallist panacea they thought it was.

 

 

 

Article – The American Government’s Secret Plan for Surviving the End of the World

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This led to a key recommendation: five 50-person “interagency cadres” that would be pre-positioned or pre-deployed during emergencies to support would-be presidential successors. These “presidential successor support teams,” codenamed TREETOP cadres by the Pentagon, would deploy randomly to any one of “several hundred sites, perhaps 2-3 thousand, that would be pre-selected,” allowing for a relocation of institutional knowledge that was “highly flexible and adaptive.”

A fascinating little piece about a government-continuity program that came out from, of all things, the Carter administration. Presidential successor support teams? Secret hideouts spread across the land? Agencies tasked with teams to transport and protect possible Presidential successors? For those of you who remember your apocalypse fiction, this seems mildly reminiscent to the old ‘Guardians’ pulp novels from back in the day.

Make no mistake, there’s probably some sort of “Crystal Peak”-type facility out there that we don’t know about (as opposed to the ones we do know about, like the Greenbrier.) Are there special ‘cadres’ of .gov out there whose sole purpose is to navigate political VIPs through the imagined chaos to concrete-reinforced safety? Maybe. It’s certainly an interesting thing to think about. I want to say I recall reading somewhere that there were elite military units that were trained and tasked with just that sort of duty but I can’t recall where.

A quick search on Google for “Treetop” and “Continuity of government” turned up a few more results, but this one was interesting.: It mentions “… supplemented by more than 100 other bunkers, sprinkled around the country, as well as numerous mobile units, that have included two ships”

Interestingly, there was a recent article I read about how during World War Two the Brits had a special plan, team, and real estate specifically for hauling the monarchy to safety in the event of German invasion. And, buildingo n that, a Cold War evacuation plan as well.

Interesting article, though, and it raises interesting questions. To me, that  made it worth the short read and inclusion here. Who knows what sort of poured concrete palaces hide ‘neath the deserts and prairies?

 

 

Link – Descend Into Great Britain’s Network of Secret Nuclear Bunkers

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Seems to be the season for bunker news………

We’re standing in a room buried 10 feet below the North Yorkshire moors in northeast England, near the village of Castleton. The wind howls over the hatch above our heads as Hanlon—no expert, just an enthusiast—describes how the room would have been used, as an outpost of English civility and resourcefulness in the face of a nuclear attack. This bunker is one of hundreds just like it, scattered across the country. They’re no longer in use, having been decommissioned for decades, but they’re a nationwide network of relics of fear—a fear that seems never to have left.

As I understand it, there were quite a few of these ‘observation’ bunkers in England. Small one- or two-man concrete rooms no bigger than a bedroom buried to provide observers with some token protection. At least one was purchased privately for use as a ‘study room’. I suppose with a bunker that small it’s best function is as a bolt-hole for when you’re on the move and need to resupply or lay low for a few nights. Otherwise, it seems awfully small to live in for any length of time more than a few days.

On the bright side, a smallish bunker like that would be a pretty basic build project as opposed to something larger, I would think.

Article – Why so many Americans are buying up personal bunkers

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Tom Soulsby, 69, and his wife, Mary, were one of the first to buy a bunker at Vivos xPoint — the self-proclaimed “largest survival community on Earth” — near the South Dakota town of Edgemont. In 2017, he made a $25,000 down payment and signed a 99-year land lease (with fees of $1,000 per year) to occupy an elliptical-shaped, 2,200 square-foot underground concrete bunker once used as a military fortress during World War II to store weapons and ammunition.

Dude..who wouldn’t want to buy a bunker?

Someday I’ll have that nice little concrete cabin in the middle of nowhere. Just hoping it happens while Im still young enough to enjoy it.