Tag Archives: bunkers

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.

Link – https://intershelter.com/

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These look very interesting. A couple things jump out at me. First, these seem like they’d be an interesting way to dump a small, easily concealed ‘cabin’ on a piece of remote property. Additionally, since they’re pretty much a ‘kit house’ I’d imagine you can knock it down and transport it if you needed to.

Not sure how much stress the design can handle, but it’d be interesting to use it as a ‘form’ and shotcrete over it or something similar. Byrying it seems unwiae but it looks like it wouldn’t take much to build up some railroad tie berms around three sides of it to make it all but invisible.

Pricing seems reasonable…for about seven grand you can get something that beats being homeless. If a fella had a piece of undeveloped property out in the sticks, this might make a nice weekend cabin sort of thing to hunker down in while you build the primary residence.

Also might make for an interesting ‘dual purpose’ building…plant int on your property as a shed or storage building that can be refitted as temporary housing in a crisis.

As I said, very interesting. I’d like to see one up close.

Article – Father buys £20,000 Cold War bunker

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A father who is so determined that his children do well in their school exams has splashed out £20,000 on a nuclear bunker in the Essex countryside so they can revise in peace.

Raymond Sturgess purchased the bunker, which is 12 feet under ground, so that his four children aged between seven and 16 are free from distractions when it comes to studying.

The Cold War relic, which only measures 13 feet by nine feet in size, was part of a former army base but is now a nature reserve in Chigwell.

A 13’x9’room ain’t a whole lotta space. Matter of fact, its about the size of your typical bedroom.

I’ve seen articles from time to time about tiny little observation bunkers coming up for sale in the UK. Usually they’re rather tiny affairs that don’t amount to much more than this one.

The more I read about military bunkers and shelters, and see what is being done by other countries, I’m becoming less a fan of the underground ones and more a fan of the partially-buried, and the above-ground varieties…especially as done by our friends the Swiss.

Bunkers of this sort don’t come up in the US very often, although I did read about some organization that did a land swap with the feds and wound up owning some awesome NSA-grade bunker facility out in the woods. The closest thing you might find to these Swiss style above-ground concrete bunkers are the old AT&T relay bunkers that dot the countryside. But, thats another post altogether…………

Link – Bunker for sale

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A superbly preserved piece of WWII history, an untouched Normandy German Gun Battery has been put for sale.

The huge gun battery and complex at Querqueville / Amfreville (Stp 277) is up for sale – as of this week.

It is well documented and its history is well known as it defended the port of Cherbourg from the hills above the city. Battery York as it was locally known, fought an artillery duel with USS Texas before being over-run after a land battle with the US army.

I would imagine the problem with buying any ‘survival bunker’ that you find on the internet is that, by virtue of being on the internet, everyone knows about it.

While the feasibility of converting such a structure into something more practical and useful may be questionable, these sorts of structures are fascinating to me. I have a book here, Fortress Europe: European Fortifications Of World War II, which is basically a guidebook to some of the more elaborate and complex bunkers scattered across Europe’s battlefields. There’s a lot of concrete under those green hills.

I don’t think I’d necessarily want to live in something like that, but I do see more and more concrete houses that are very attractive, cozy, and still offer the degree of invulnerability that makes them attractive to me.

The fact that many of these flaktowers, bunkers, submarine pens, and whatnot are still in, essentially, undamaged condition after almost 80 years is pretty good testimony to what poured concrete, rebar, and an immense budget can accomplish.

Speaking of concrete, did you know that one of Thomas Edisons less-successful ventures was selling kits and forms to build concrete houses? They even had concrete fixtures in the houses such as bathtubs. The technology has improved since then and there’s actually a local business here that does concrete-log homes….pretty neat. A log home that would be impervious to pretty much everything.

Anyway, while an old WW2 bunker would be nice to play in, I suspect it’s real merit comes from examining it and learning more about how such structures should be built and designed.

Article – Underground home was built as Cold War-era hideaway

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I’ve seen pictures of this place before,  but this is the first article I’ve seen with this much detail. But I admire the kitschy over-the-top attempts to make an underground concrete room look like a green backyard. Then again, isn’t Vegas home of fake Eiffel Towers, Stutes of Liberty, and enormous fake boobs?

The underground house at 3970 Spencer St. was built for comfort, too, with two hot tubs, a sauna and an in-ground pool in a room larger than some houses in the valley.

It was also constructed to withstand a nuclear blast. It had to be. Girard “Jerry” B. Henderson, who had the home built in 1978, planned to wait out the end of the world inside the structure. Now it’s on the market for $1.7 million, which includes the two-bedroom underground house, the one-bedroom underground guest house, the two-bedroom, two-story caretaker’s house, a four-car garage and more than 1 acre of surface property.

“I’ve been told when he built it, he had a million dollars of marble imported from Italy,” said Winston King of Kingly Properties, which is handling the sale of the house. “It’s here on the fireplace and around the pool now.”

When it was built, the only signs of the house on the surface were an unusual number of ground-mounted air-conditioning units camouflaged by clusters of large rocks. A few larger rocks concealed stairways and an elevator. A caretaker’s house was added later, and the main entrance to the underground house now runs through it.

When visitors reach the ground level, they’re in the front yard of the house looking at the entrance to the 40-foot-by-46-foot room. To the left are the dance floor and the stage. The décor still greatly reflects the original owners’ tastes, from the indoor fountains and waterfalls to the abundance of pink in the kitchen and bathroom.

“They had it all down here,” said King, opening up an artificial rock to reveal an underground outdoor grill. “This vents through the tree behind it.”