When TSHTF, do you go underground or go mobile?
Jon Stokes 07.08.13
The Blaze is running a fascinating profile of a guy who’s working on a sprawling underground bunker complex for families to retreat to when Doomsday drops.
The Kansas caverns are 100 feet to 150 feet below the surface and have a constant natural temperature in the low 70s. They are supported by thick limestone pillars six times stronger than concrete and will have blast doors built to withstand a one-megaton nuclear explosion as close as 10 miles away, Vicino said.
Other than being surrounded by more than a mile and a half of 6-foot-high chain-link fence topped with sharp rows of barbed wire, the land above ground isn’t distinguishable from expanses of hills and trees that surround it. The proposed shelter’s entrances – nondescript concrete loading docks tucked discretely into the wooded hillside – are easily defensible against any potential intruders provided there’s not a full-scale military attack, Vicino said.
The Army used the caverns – created by limestone mining operations that started in the late 1880s – for decades as a storage facility before putting them up for auction last year. The winning bid in December was $1.7 million, but financing fell through and the site was put up for sale again…
The shelter will have enough space for more than 1,000 RVs and up to about 5,000 people. Members will be charged $1,000 for every lineal foot of their RV to purchase their space, plus $1,500 per person for food. That means a person who plans to park a 30-foot vehicle in the shelter with four people inside will pay $30,000 for the space and $6,000 for food…
Vivos also owns a shelter in Indiana with room for 80 people to live comfortably for up to a year. There, members pay $50,000 per adult and $35,000 per child, so a family with two adults and two children would have to come up with $170,000 to be part of the post-apocalyptic generation.
Purchasers will be required to pay for the full balance before taking possession of their shelter space, though the company has offered limited financing in the past with a sizable down payment.
You have to click through and see the pictures for this place — it’s insane. I mean, literally insane.
My opinion, of course, is that unless you’ve got a really large net worth, spending $170,000 in cash on a survival shelter is just nuts. Think about it. If you’re in the highest tax bracket, you’d have to make around $200K pre-tax (depending on where you live) to bring home that much cash in an average year, so even if you’re one of the few people making, say, $500K a year, that’s still a ridiculous amount to invest in a single prepping item. And then, if TSHTF, you have to actually make it out to this place in one piece. Think of all the other preps that you could have for that amount of money — preps that you could actually take with you.
To be honest, if I were going to spend that amount of money on a “bug-out location,” I’d make it a mobile bug-out location and buy one of those Unimog-based, self-contained, off-road RVs (pictured above). That way, you could really move away from the disaster zone, no matter where it is.
