A twofer. First up, The New Yorker, August 26:
When you buy your own personal bunker, your starter home can be your finisher home, too
Thirty-nine per cent of Americans believe that we’re living in end times, and the market for underground hideouts is heating up.
hat if they’re right? What if a nuke drops, or climate change turns the world into a foaming puddle, or the next pandemic is spread through selfies? Billionaires have recently been spending millions building themselves customized bunkers, in the hope that they can ride out the apocalypse in splendor. In January, a video surfaced of the rapper Rick Ross bragging that his bunker will be better than Elon Musk’s bunker. (Musk is not known to have a bunker, but that’s a detail.) Ross’s bunker will have multiple “wings” and a “water maker.” Also, plenty of canned goods. Ross’s bunker might even have its own bunker. But what about me—and, if I’m being generous, you? Are there affordable underground shelters available for us to hole up in?
A few months back, I started to scan real-estate Web sites. Hmm, I wondered. Might throw pillows brighten up the underground scheelite mine in Beaver County, Utah, that was converted into a community fallout shelter during the Cold War (a steal at nine hundred and ninety-five thousand dollars, when you consider how many light-bulb filaments you could make from the leftover tungsten you could knock loose)? Or how about the concrete-and-steel stronghold in Hilliard, Ohio, built by A.T. & T. and the Army in 1971 to protect the nation’s communications system in case of nuclear attack? It comes with a “1970’s-era smoking room.” (Note to self: Take up smoking a few months before world ends.) Would house guests get the hint if I mentioned that my new home had three-thousand-pound blast-proof doors? ($1.25 million for nine acres.)
I considered breaking the bank ($4.9 million) for a compound in Battle Creek, Michigan: more than two hundred and ninety acres encompassing several dwellings, the largest being a fourteen-thousand-square-foot affair that looks like a soap opera’s idea of a mansion, with indoor pool and “high-end” appliances (if there’s a Miele waffle-maker, I need that house!)—and, below, a spacious bunker with its own shooting range and grow room. (Phew! Who can survive without daily fresh fenugreek?) Unfortunately, the owner of that particular McBunker wouldn’t allow me to tour the place, because I couldn’t show proof of funding. This is a standard requirement when shopping for bunkers; so few “comps” exist that banks cannot assess their value, and thus won’t give mortgages.
After weeks of scrolling, I found a handful of dream hideaways on the market whose sellers were willing to let me take a tour. There were two bunkers in Montana, one of which sleeps at least ninety; a prepper bunker in Missouri that features an inconspicuous entrance and a conspicuous arsenal of guns (not included in sale, but makes you think twice before criticizing the kitchen-countertop choice); a defunct missile-silo site in North Dakota; and a twenty-thousand-square-foot cave in Arkansas used by its previous owner to raise earthworms. (Favorite bit of real-estate marketing copy: “The worm room speaks for itself.”)
I decided to tour the larger of the two advertised earth homes in Montana. Theresa Lunn, a local real-estate broker who specializes in bunker sales, showed me around. From the outside, this hole in the ground looked as if it could be the home of a paranoid hobbit. Built into an otherwise unremarkable snow-speckled knoll is a three-foot-thick concrete slab, artfully flanked by boulders. Positioned in the slab was a rusty steel door so tiny that I would have to duck to enter. Lunn took out a small key and struggled for a long while to open a padlock that secured a heavy chain around the door handles.
We were at the end of a long dirt road in the middle of Paradise Valley, not far from Yellowstone Park, but exactly where, I cannot reveal. I promised Lunn, who’d promised the seller, that the location would remain secret.
She had told me earlier that this was the largest of four getaways originally built in 1989 by a member of the Church Universal and Triumphant, a cult led by Elizabeth Clare Prophet, who predicted that nuclear Armageddon would occur in the spring of 1990, and urged her thousands of followers to bunker down ASAP. (She’d previously sent out a “save the date’’ claiming that the world would end the previous October, but she changed her mind.)
After Lunn got the door open, she ushered me into what looked like a large drainage pipe with ten feet of headroom, painted in a cheery shade of teal. This was the bunker’s entry hall. I made a mental note that, if I were to move in, I’d relocate the cartons of apple juice, canning jars, and other jumbled supplies piled there to the food pantry in the basement. Better yet, I’d toss them. I noticed that a bunch of the stuff was expired. Among the stored food: a three-foot-tall barrel of walnuts and cartons of barley, adzuki beans, “health food” mayonnaise, “home storage” wheat, and abundant bacon bits.
Just past the entryway, there is, for your convenience after a long day out in the radiation, a roomy decontamination shower alongside handy instructional posters. For example, “Eyes: Irrigate with large amounts of normal saline or water. Direct flow from inner angle (close to nose) toward outer angle of eye. Save fluid and survey. . . . If okay, wrap [self] in blanket and proceed to your room.” “Your room” would likely be a nook the size of a substantial walk-in closet containing four wooden bunks; some of the beds I saw were painted a Laura Ashley-adjacent shade of lilac (which coördinated with the chintz floral coverlets but not with the brown industrial carpeting or the blobby blown-insulation walls). If you are lucky enough to get the master bedroom, you’ll find a good amount of space and privacy, as well as a life-size marble-composite statue of the Virgin Mary watching over you. On a side table, I spied a souvenir copy of USA Today from September 12, 2001, with the headline “ACT OF WAR.”
“What I think is the most inadequate thing about the bunker is the laundry facility,” Lunn said. “When everybody’s out working in the fields or whatever, growing their own stuff, and then comes home. . . .” She raised an eyebrow. On a more positive note, she pointed out that the temperature never drops much below forty-eight degrees: “The cool thing is that the pipes never freeze!” When I asked her whom she viewed as her ideal buyer, she said, “It takes a special type. But at this price point, you couldn’t even pour the concrete used here.”....
....MUCH MORE
And from Petapixel, August 29, a contrasting end-times aesthetic:
Photographer Visits Underground House Built by Eccentric Millionaire for Nuclear Fallout
Life-like scenery is painted on the underground walls of the house. | Alastair Philip Wiper
An underground house — perfect for nuclear fallout — built by an eccentric millionaire was visited by a photographer who documents doomsday locations.
Alastair Philip Wiper visited the site in Las Vegas which was built and lived in by Jerry Henderson and his wife in the late 1970s and early 1980s.
“This would be a dream place to live during the apocalypse — at least, better than any other bunker I have ever seen,” Wiper tells PetaPixel.
“You need to have a penchant for over-the-top kitsch, insane colour combinations and James Bond-villain-lair aesthetics. Which I do.”....
....MUCH MORE
