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).
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.
The British (or Commonwealth types, I suppose) take a little national pride in their ‘two guys in a shed’ stereotype of entrepreneurship. We Americans kinda started that ball with our ‘company founded in a garage’ model. Heck, I remember when NASA was just two drunk guys with a case of dynamite. Anyway, there’s a channel on YouTube of some limey who does some fairly adventurous creating. Once in a while he does something that I find rather interesting and , perhaps, useful at a later date. Such as the bunker he built under his yard. A nice project, indeed. Not content to just have a hidden bunker, he has a video about digging secret tunnels to connect the bunker to his house. Gotta say, the guy has his act together for discreetly removing spoils and, honestly, doing a pretty titanic job of digging.
I find this sort of thing highly informative and somewhat inspirational. I mean, if you’re going to have an underground bunker why wouldn’t you have a tunnel network to go with it, right? You know, pull up the rug in the kitchen and -presto- trapdoor to a tunnel network that leads to the bunker, the garage, an emergency exit hidden in some shrubs at the edge of the property line, etc.
Major kudos to the guy for building his own tools to do the job. I wish I was that handy.
If you build a home on a beach where everyone and the .gov knows there’s gonna be strong hurricanes, it seems that when your house blows away like something out of The Wizard of Oz you really have no one to blame but yourself. However, if you’ve got the resources, and the inclination, you can apparently throw in some engineering to make sure you have the last house standing.
I’ve covered my fascination with concrete dwellings in other posts (search for the HHG tag). But sheer strength isn’t all you need…you gotta have solidly engineered ideas, quality materials, and competent construction. In the example shown in the article, these folks were willing to make some tradeoffs and lose a battle (sacrificing the ground floor storage area) to win the war (keep the house standing).
It’s hard to find old construction that has all the features we wacky survivalists would like to have, and retrofitting an older place can be almost as expensive as building new. I’m inclined to go for a purpose-built place. When it’s time to break ground on Commander Zero’s Post-Nuclear Bunker O’ Love and Lingerie Proving Ground (also known as the Fortress of Derpitude) ypu can bet everything is going to be done with an eye towards surviving forest fire, gun fire, economic meltdown, and as many other forseeable events as possible. Won’t be cheap, I’m sure, but I’ll bet I’ll sleep real good when its all done.
I’ve always liked the idea of a little cabin that, while looking rather unassuming and generic, is actually made of a highly resilient material like concrete. I’ve always been fascinated with this product made here in Montana. But, sometimes, for non-residential uses such as secure storage, you don’t really need a nice appearance. And while I have seen plenty of thick-walled concrete structures, the roof is always the weak spot. It seems like you never see a non-flat concrete roof. So, I was surprised to see this in my travels today:
Its a concrete building, about the size of a small cabin, that is used by a local utility for some purpose. But what catches my attention is that the roof is a big slab of concrete. Many concrete structures don’t have concrete roofs…making the roof the weak spot. This baby, however, is delightfully 100% concrete. Forest fires are no problem around this thing.
My use? If I had a place out in the sticks, I’d love to have a place like this as my ‘shed’ where I’d keep my goodies. Trick it out with a more reinfoced entryway (or, better, a hidden tunnel access) and I’d feel pretty happy knowing my stuff was secure.
For a more stylish look, theyre doing amazing things with concrete panles and pouring these days. This one is one of my favorites.
But, for now, I’d settle for a nice chunk of middle of nowhere with a nice concrete building on it like the one shown above. Gotta keep playing that Powerball.
I’d made a reference a few weeks ago to the ‘concrete log’ manufacturer out here who sells some very convincing concrete logs to use as building material. They have a cutaway display at the airport that never fails to catch my attention. I was killing time out there the other day waiting for a flight to arrive and took some pics.
Slick, huh? Tell you what, that’d be some primo building material for the deep woods up here. Rain forest or dry forest, it’d be pretty much impervious to rot and flame. And most small arms fire, I’d imagine.
Sure anyone can build a home out of concrete to keep the zombies at bay. What really throws you into Omega Man territory are the little personal touches that give the homeowner the advantage and gives the bad guys a Very Bad Day. One such fellow was Harry Bennett.
Bennett was a longtime high-level employee at Ford in Michigan. He had absolutely no background in engineering, automobiles, business, or finance. What he did have experience in, however, was boxing, guns, slavish devotion to Ford, and moral flexibility. Hired on a handshake from Ford himself, Bennett put together the Ford Service Division….a division of Ford that did absolutely nothing to fix cars but did everything to fix union problems. Mr. Bennett, for all intents and purposes, was Ford’s top union-busting goon. Given the green light to build what was essentially a private army, Bennett employed “football players, boxers, wrestlers and even Detroit river gang members as Service Department employees”.
Harry Bennett conducting a business meeting with union representatives in his usual style.
With a history of fights, brawls, and machine gun exchanges with union organizers, Mr. Bennett, as you might well imagine, made some enemies. To keep himself whole and intact, Bennett built himself a ‘castle’ in Ypsilanti, MI. He also built a weekend cabin, also out of concrete, with features similar to what he did at his castle.
Here’s a video tour of the castle as it stands today:
Gun ports? Yes. Trick staircases? Absolutely. Hidden tunnels? Naturally? Tunnels patrolled by fearsome jungle cats? Of course! Bennett spared no effort, or aggregate, to build structures he thought would keep him safe. (Yet, he still managed to get shot in his own living room.)
His weekend cottage was similarly designed with staircases with steps of random height to trip pursuers, escape tunnels to a dock and getaway boat, airfield, pillboxes on the roof, a moat with sharpened stakes, and a bridge over said moat rigged with dynamite. Bennett was full Burt Gummer before his time. The lodge, like the castle, still stands today and is owned by the Boy Scouts of America. Here’s a fascinating photo gallery of a tour that shows off the many hardened features.
Bennett’s buildings had quite a few features that we would find highly desirable for our own needs. I am most impressed by the stairs with steps of differing heights. This plays on an observed oddity:
Bennett would, as the story goes, practice running up and down the uneven stairs so he’d have an advantage over pursuers who would, presumably, go tumbling down the stairs as they encountered the uneven steps. It’s little details like that that separate the good from the great.
If you read all the links above, you’ll see Bennett had the usual assortment of hidden stairwells, secret gun compartments, false bookshelves, and other gimmicks we come to expect. He’s also the only person I’ve read about, in somewhat modern times, who actually incorporated a moat into his bunker plans. (Being ready to dynamite the bridge over the moat on a moments notice? Thats a baller touch.)
So there you have it, a brawling union-buster from the Prohibition-era could show us a trick or two when it comes to building our fortified homes. Note that it’s dang near 80-some-odd years later and those concrete homes are still standing and still in good enough repair to be occupied. Here to stay, built to last.
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(“Harder Homes and Gardens” is a neologism that is attributable to ,Rawles in one of his books. I’m clever, but not that clever.)
