13 ms·

The bunker builders preparing for doomsday

33 points by airstrike 6y ago

ehnto 6y ago
I have a van set up for longish mountain biking trips set up for being off-grid. It was never a resilience plan, but when the pandemic hit and supermarkets were hotspots of unrest, I felt a bit more comfortable knowing I could get the hell out of dodge if it went downhill.
- tlrobinson 6y ago
  Anecdotally, I’ve noticed a slight increase in high-end camper vans parked in affluent neighborhoods of San Francisco over the past year.
Finnucane 6y ago
Maybe I missed it, but notably absent from the listing of Hall's bunker's amenities was a medical facility.
- HenryKissinger 6y ago
  Even if a bunker for rich couples included a fully equipped intensive care unit with an operating bloc and a team of doctors and surgeons on call. In a post apocalyptic world, there is no medical school. Once your health staff is dead or too old to continue, you're on your own. In a post apocalyptic world, there are no high tech factories to manufacture medical equipment. From complex machines to basic surgical masks and gloves, bandaids, morphin, syringes, vaccines, gloves, none of those are manufactured anymore in a post apocalyptic world. The factories have been destroyed. The skilled workers who knew how to operate the machines are dead or who knows where. Okay, so let's say that your bunker for rich couples with a mini hospital also includes a factory to manufacture medical equipment. Gloves and masks are made of plastic. Petroleum products. So let's say your bunker for rich couples with a mini hospital and full staff complement and a medical factory now also has an oil extraction operation and a refinery on site. You need petroleum engineers. These engineers have families and will expect to be well taken care of. Replacing the engineers with robots? You're gonna need a robot factory, built by humans. And so on. See where I'm going? If you take this reasoning to its logic end you arrive at a full society. No one can survive well in the long term without a modern society and all of its amenities, including government, public services, and taxes. Exactly all that would cease to exist in a doomsday scenario. Unless you are prepared to accept a standard of living worthy of the Middle Ages. Every man for himself is a libertarian fantasy.
  - tmpxgdqrcKFuG 6y ago
    You teach your children what you know, pass on your knowledge and improvise where you need to.
  - xyzzyz 6y ago
    > No one can survive well in the long term without a modern society and all of its amenities, including government, public services, and taxes. No one can survive in the long term, full stop. Modern civilization makes it significantly safer, more comfortable and longer, but rest assured, there are plenty of humans on planet Earth who survive just fine without governments, public services and taxes.
    - HenryKissinger 6y ago
      > there are plenty of humans on planet Earth who survive just fine without governments, public services and taxes. I disagree. Let me look up a checklist of failed states. Yemen. Libya. Somalia. Syria. DR Congo. Hmmmm. Exactly the worst countries to live in. Now let me look up checklists of countries with the highest levels of human development index, life expectancy at birth, and income per capita. Norway. Sweden. Denmark. Canada. The United States. South Korea. Singapore. All countries with well established governments and public services infrastructure, and a social safety net (this is somewhat less true for the US). Most humans living in places without governments and well organized societies live either in the middle of literal warzones, desert wastelands, or are indigenous tribes living far from civilization. Bunker survival can be nice and pretty for a few years at most, but the idea that modern technology has abolished man's dependence on his community is a fantasy.
      - xyzzyz 6y ago
        > or are indigenous tribes living far from civilization. Yes, and they survived this way for thousands of years.
  - abraae 6y ago
    There are levels of survival. Yes, in a post-apocalyptic society you probably won't be able to get your medical gloves. But you will be better off that the middle ages, because you'll know about sterilizing your instruments and so on, you'll have medical textbooks and trained doctors who will know that leeches are not in fact useful for treating headaches, ear infections or hemorrhoids. You won't be able to fab computer chips, but if you have a good stockpile of cheap arduino stuff you'll be able to make machines and automate aspects of your life. You won't be able to create petrol to power your vehicle but you (or some handy McGyver type) probably can modify existing cars to run on firewood (like almost every motorised vehicle in continental Europe was during WWII). Our existing knowledge alone would make the survivor's post-apocalyptic lives far, far better than the middle ages.
- sneak 6y ago
  There's a shooting range, so I have a hunch about the plan for the post-doomsday critically ill in a sealed community with limited food supplies. :D
Simulacra 6y ago
The thing I don't quite get about bunkers is that they are stationary targets. If 100 refugees storm a place, I don't care what kind of security you have, you're still a sitting target. Eventually the numbers overwhelm you.
- chrisco255 6y ago
  That's why you have a replica bunker just below it, just in case. Gotta stay antifragile.
  - airstrike 6y ago
    Or have a replica bunker next to it but it's rigged to blow a dirty nuke and trigger an apocalypse-upon-apocalypse in case the zombie horde comes knocking (I'm not seriously suggesting this)
  - darkteflon 6y ago
    It’s bunkers all the way down.
  - taneq 6y ago
    Or a shoddy fake bunker just above it as a decoy.
- hanniabu 6y ago
  Well if others know there's a bunker there then you're already doing something wrong
- myWindoonn 6y ago
  This is a point worth exploring. There is a part of the world, the Eurasian steppe, where folks still practice nomadic herding precisely because the geography discourages trying to defend stationary encampments. Today, cities dot the North American plains, another region traditionally inhabited by nomads; this is because of strong social institutions. If those social institutions fail, then the nomadic way of life will become preferable again. I wonder whether these bunker-builders would get more bang for their buck if they were to build inside a city instead of outside. Investments in infrastructure around them could improve security at a structural level. (A distant relative thread notes that bunkers could not possibly have full hospital service.) A castle does not have just a keep, but an entire town inside its walls, or else it could not support its keep.
wartron 6y ago
Are there any studies about using artificial light /day/night cycle for chickens in like a cave or bunker?
- beerandt 6y ago
  They already do it in the coops to increase number of day night cycles.
  - wartron 6y ago
    Thanks, im sure there is some research, but coops i've driven past seam to still use normal day/night cycles with like skylights... anything with entirely artificial light?
    - beerandt 6y ago
      The dark is required, so many are all but blacked out. But I'm not sure on 100% artificial. I do know it's completely over reasearched. Coops are now one of the most crazy over-specified engineering things you'll ever see. They test and maximize cost efficiency of things like: how often to wipe dust off the light bulbs, given 50 different variables, and then contractually write it out. For every tiny thing, and that was 10+ years ago.
      - wartron 6y ago
        I can believe that, chicken coops probably one of the oldest studied things.
luxuryballs 6y ago
If it’s so bad that I need a bunker is it really even worth it at that point?
- sneak 6y ago
  I think the much bigger concern would be getting there. In such a scenario where you need a 3 year food supply, I doubt the highways to get to where these things inevitably are will be usable. The counter for this would be to relocate there earlier in the unfolding of a crisis, before most people have caught on, but then you'd have to go more often (lower relocation trigger threshold), and also stay there until it's over, which would mean you'd have spent ~all of 2020 in one.
  - Spooky23 6y ago
    Many people did that. A friend sold his camp near Lake Champlain to some dude from NYC, sight unseen, for about $100k over asking in April. It was unwinterized, and the buyer dropped a fortune into making it a 4 season home.
  - taneq 6y ago
    Honestly if I lived in the U.S. or Europe and I had a bunker I still wouldn't leave it now.
  - XorNot 6y ago
    This actually happened to a bunch of the rich people who, by the time they realized COVID would be a good time to relocate to their New Zealand apocalypse bunker, couldn't get flights out of the US or into NZ to get there. I wonder how many are re-evaluating their location choice.
- scollet 6y ago
  I've been around enough startups to know I can just grab a shovel when the bombs fall.
- roenxi 6y ago
  Probably. I mean, having 12 months of food and other necessities sounds pointless and then COVID happens and it looks sorta clever. The so-called "Reign of Terror" in France lasted about 12 months, that would be a really great time to have had a bunker stocked for 3 years. We don't know what will go wrong. Being over-prepared and easily weathering difficulties is a much better plan than being underprepared.
8bitsrule 6y ago
"He waved me over to the nuclear, biological, and chemical air filtration unit for the condo and explained that they had three military-grade filters each providing 2,000-cubic feet per minute of filtration..." That'll work. Until Vic and Blood come along with a sack full of rags, plastic sacks, a tarp to plug up the air intakes ... then wait to hear the Screamers.
- jjoonathan 6y ago
  Defense is usually the aspect preppers most enjoy giving consideration, not something they short change.
  - XorNot 6y ago
    They enjoy thinking about set-piece scenarios against enemies who give up and fight the way they want them too. They're really bad at considering the actual logistical and tactical issues i.e. have they adequately cleared trees and cover from the bunker entrances, are the air intakes able to be shielded from gun fire which might pierce the filter assemblies, do they have adequate overlapping covering positions for them, how do you replace an air intake filter clogged with soot from someone burning a bonfire upwind for a few days, do you have adequate surveillance to cover nightfall? I mean a fairly obvious problem is that starting a big fire near the bunker is more or less going to both clog the air filters and completely blind and destroy most surface surveillance gear...which let's you get in close and then duct-tape the air intakes up.
    - jjoonathan 6y ago
      > They enjoy thinking ... They're really bad at considering Have you ever had one of these people talk your ear off? Hidden, remote ventilation intakes, surveillance, hidden escape hatches to flank their opponents, and overlapping cover are the sort of thing they spend their waking hours planning, dreaming, building, and earning money to afford. Saying they're bad at considering logistics and tactics is like saying Lord of The Rings nerds are bad at considering the lore. Come on.
    - 6y ago
larufus 6y ago
This article reminds me of Cory Doctorow’s short story “Masque of the Red Death” in Radicalized (2019), which haunts me still and cured me of any bunker curious tendencies.
- exolymph 6y ago
  Presumably inspired by Poe's original, in case anyone's curious: https://www.poemuseum.org/the-masque-of-the-red-death https://www.poemuseum.org/the-masque-of-the-red-death
spoonjim 6y ago
The day the shit really hits the fan, the guys who build these bunkers are going to steal them from the billionaires who bought them. Joey might have his own but he'll tell his cousins that they can go beat the shit out of Jeff Bezos and take over his whole bunker.
- CamperBob2 6y ago
  Pitch this to Amazon Studios and I'll watch it on Prime Vide... uh, never mind.
- therockspush 6y ago
  I'm realizing now they probably had this same idea and are hiring "Independent Consultants" to pen test their bunkers. If they haven't...
  - CamperBob2 6y ago
    How the job starts: Contractor agrees to half payment now, half on completion of bunker How the job ends: Contractor shows up to collect final payment, ends up in a shallow grave on the far side of the retaining wall behind the cistern You don't get to be a billionaire by leaving loose ends lying around...
  - spoonjim 6y ago
    Who's likelier to have been in the military and actually seized a position from an adversary? Joey's cousins or Jeff Bezos'? All the pen testing in the world isn't going to help Bill and Melinda and their security team hold their bunker against a larger group of Navy Seals looking for a safe place to ride out the whatever. Or, for that matter, Bill and Melinda's security people looking at the 1 year food supply, looking at Bill and Melinda, and making it a 2 year food supply. The fact is, in a shit hits the fan scenario, money has no value, and thus the world's billionaires become just random dweebs.
    - therockspush 6y ago
      I agree with you, I just think it'll be a scene of paying one half of the population to kill the other. There will be plenty of softer targets meal team six will be going after first, with plenty of fighting to keep them distracted. I'm picturing Bill running the old embrace, extend, and extinguish model until they all just kill each other or die of hunger/radiation/lead poisoning.
davidhyde 6y ago
This reminded me of the book series The Wool Trilogy by Hugh Howey.
deleted 6y ago
[deleted]

33 points by airstrike 6y ago

I have a van set up for longish mountain biking trips set up for being off-grid. It was never a resilience plan, but when the pandemic hit and supermarkets were hotspots of unrest, I felt a bit more comfortable knowing I could get the hell out of dodge if it went downhill.

tlrobinson 6y ago
Anecdotally, I’ve noticed a slight increase in high-end camper vans parked in affluent neighborhoods of San Francisco over the past year.

Finnucane 6y ago

Maybe I missed it, but notably absent from the listing of Hall's bunker's amenities was a medical facility.

HenryKissinger 6y ago
Even if a bunker for rich couples included a fully equipped intensive care unit with an operating bloc and a team of doctors and surgeons on call. In a post apocalyptic world, there is no medical school. Once your health staff is dead or too old to continue, you're on your own. In a post apocalyptic world, there are no high tech factories to manufacture medical equipment. From complex machines to basic surgical masks and gloves, bandaids, morphin, syringes, vaccines, gloves, none of those are manufactured anymore in a post apocalyptic world. The factories have been destroyed. The skilled workers who knew how to operate the machines are dead or who knows where. Okay, so let's say that your bunker for rich couples with a mini hospital also includes a factory to manufacture medical equipment. Gloves and masks are made of plastic. Petroleum products. So let's say your bunker for rich couples with a mini hospital and full staff complement and a medical factory now also has an oil extraction operation and a refinery on site. You need petroleum engineers. These engineers have families and will expect to be well taken care of. Replacing the engineers with robots? You're gonna need a robot factory, built by humans. And so on. See where I'm going? If you take this reasoning to its logic end you arrive at a full society. No one can survive well in the long term without a modern society and all of its amenities, including government, public services, and taxes. Exactly all that would cease to exist in a doomsday scenario. Unless you are prepared to accept a standard of living worthy of the Middle Ages. Every man for himself is a libertarian fantasy.
- tmpxgdqrcKFuG 6y ago
  You teach your children what you know, pass on your knowledge and improvise where you need to.
- xyzzyz 6y ago
  > No one can survive well in the long term without a modern society and all of its amenities, including government, public services, and taxes. No one can survive in the long term, full stop. Modern civilization makes it significantly safer, more comfortable and longer, but rest assured, there are plenty of humans on planet Earth who survive just fine without governments, public services and taxes.
  - HenryKissinger 6y ago
    > there are plenty of humans on planet Earth who survive just fine without governments, public services and taxes. I disagree. Let me look up a checklist of failed states. Yemen. Libya. Somalia. Syria. DR Congo. Hmmmm. Exactly the worst countries to live in. Now let me look up checklists of countries with the highest levels of human development index, life expectancy at birth, and income per capita. Norway. Sweden. Denmark. Canada. The United States. South Korea. Singapore. All countries with well established governments and public services infrastructure, and a social safety net (this is somewhat less true for the US). Most humans living in places without governments and well organized societies live either in the middle of literal warzones, desert wastelands, or are indigenous tribes living far from civilization. Bunker survival can be nice and pretty for a few years at most, but the idea that modern technology has abolished man's dependence on his community is a fantasy.
    - xyzzyz 6y ago
      > or are indigenous tribes living far from civilization. Yes, and they survived this way for thousands of years.
- abraae 6y ago
  There are levels of survival. Yes, in a post-apocalyptic society you probably won't be able to get your medical gloves. But you will be better off that the middle ages, because you'll know about sterilizing your instruments and so on, you'll have medical textbooks and trained doctors who will know that leeches are not in fact useful for treating headaches, ear infections or hemorrhoids. You won't be able to fab computer chips, but if you have a good stockpile of cheap arduino stuff you'll be able to make machines and automate aspects of your life. You won't be able to create petrol to power your vehicle but you (or some handy McGyver type) probably can modify existing cars to run on firewood (like almost every motorised vehicle in continental Europe was during WWII). Our existing knowledge alone would make the survivor's post-apocalyptic lives far, far better than the middle ages.
sneak 6y ago
There's a shooting range, so I have a hunch about the plan for the post-doomsday critically ill in a sealed community with limited food supplies. :D

Simulacra 6y ago

The thing I don't quite get about bunkers is that they are stationary targets. If 100 refugees storm a place, I don't care what kind of security you have, you're still a sitting target. Eventually the numbers overwhelm you.

chrisco255 6y ago
That's why you have a replica bunker just below it, just in case. Gotta stay antifragile.
- airstrike 6y ago
  Or have a replica bunker next to it but it's rigged to blow a dirty nuke and trigger an apocalypse-upon-apocalypse in case the zombie horde comes knocking (I'm not seriously suggesting this)
- darkteflon 6y ago
  It’s bunkers all the way down.
- taneq 6y ago
  Or a shoddy fake bunker just above it as a decoy.
hanniabu 6y ago
Well if others know there's a bunker there then you're already doing something wrong
myWindoonn 6y ago
This is a point worth exploring. There is a part of the world, the Eurasian steppe, where folks still practice nomadic herding precisely because the geography discourages trying to defend stationary encampments. Today, cities dot the North American plains, another region traditionally inhabited by nomads; this is because of strong social institutions. If those social institutions fail, then the nomadic way of life will become preferable again. I wonder whether these bunker-builders would get more bang for their buck if they were to build inside a city instead of outside. Investments in infrastructure around them could improve security at a structural level. (A distant relative thread notes that bunkers could not possibly have full hospital service.) A castle does not have just a keep, but an entire town inside its walls, or else it could not support its keep.

wartron 6y ago

Are there any studies about using artificial light /day/night cycle for chickens in like a cave or bunker?

beerandt 6y ago
They already do it in the coops to increase number of day night cycles.
- wartron 6y ago
  Thanks, im sure there is some research, but coops i've driven past seam to still use normal day/night cycles with like skylights... anything with entirely artificial light?
  - beerandt 6y ago
    The dark is required, so many are all but blacked out. But I'm not sure on 100% artificial. I do know it's completely over reasearched. Coops are now one of the most crazy over-specified engineering things you'll ever see. They test and maximize cost efficiency of things like: how often to wipe dust off the light bulbs, given 50 different variables, and then contractually write it out. For every tiny thing, and that was 10+ years ago.
    - wartron 6y ago
      I can believe that, chicken coops probably one of the oldest studied things.

luxuryballs 6y ago

If it’s so bad that I need a bunker is it really even worth it at that point?

sneak 6y ago
I think the much bigger concern would be getting there. In such a scenario where you need a 3 year food supply, I doubt the highways to get to where these things inevitably are will be usable. The counter for this would be to relocate there earlier in the unfolding of a crisis, before most people have caught on, but then you'd have to go more often (lower relocation trigger threshold), and also stay there until it's over, which would mean you'd have spent ~all of 2020 in one.
- Spooky23 6y ago
  Many people did that. A friend sold his camp near Lake Champlain to some dude from NYC, sight unseen, for about $100k over asking in April. It was unwinterized, and the buyer dropped a fortune into making it a 4 season home.
- taneq 6y ago
  Honestly if I lived in the U.S. or Europe and I had a bunker I still wouldn't leave it now.
- XorNot 6y ago
  This actually happened to a bunch of the rich people who, by the time they realized COVID would be a good time to relocate to their New Zealand apocalypse bunker, couldn't get flights out of the US or into NZ to get there. I wonder how many are re-evaluating their location choice.
scollet 6y ago
I've been around enough startups to know I can just grab a shovel when the bombs fall.
roenxi 6y ago
Probably. I mean, having 12 months of food and other necessities sounds pointless and then COVID happens and it looks sorta clever. The so-called "Reign of Terror" in France lasted about 12 months, that would be a really great time to have had a bunker stocked for 3 years. We don't know what will go wrong. Being over-prepared and easily weathering difficulties is a much better plan than being underprepared.

8bitsrule 6y ago

"He waved me over to the nuclear, biological, and chemical air filtration unit for the condo and explained that they had three military-grade filters each providing 2,000-cubic feet per minute of filtration..." That'll work. Until Vic and Blood come along with a sack full of rags, plastic sacks, a tarp to plug up the air intakes ... then wait to hear the Screamers.

jjoonathan 6y ago
Defense is usually the aspect preppers most enjoy giving consideration, not something they short change.
- XorNot 6y ago
  They enjoy thinking about set-piece scenarios against enemies who give up and fight the way they want them too. They're really bad at considering the actual logistical and tactical issues i.e. have they adequately cleared trees and cover from the bunker entrances, are the air intakes able to be shielded from gun fire which might pierce the filter assemblies, do they have adequate overlapping covering positions for them, how do you replace an air intake filter clogged with soot from someone burning a bonfire upwind for a few days, do you have adequate surveillance to cover nightfall? I mean a fairly obvious problem is that starting a big fire near the bunker is more or less going to both clog the air filters and completely blind and destroy most surface surveillance gear...which let's you get in close and then duct-tape the air intakes up.
  - jjoonathan 6y ago
    > They enjoy thinking ... They're really bad at considering Have you ever had one of these people talk your ear off? Hidden, remote ventilation intakes, surveillance, hidden escape hatches to flank their opponents, and overlapping cover are the sort of thing they spend their waking hours planning, dreaming, building, and earning money to afford. Saying they're bad at considering logistics and tactics is like saying Lord of The Rings nerds are bad at considering the lore. Come on.
  - 6y ago

larufus 6y ago

This article reminds me of Cory Doctorow’s short story “Masque of the Red Death” in Radicalized (2019), which haunts me still and cured me of any bunker curious tendencies.

exolymph 6y ago
Presumably inspired by Poe's original, in case anyone's curious: https://www.poemuseum.org/the-masque-of-the-red-death https://www.poemuseum.org/the-masque-of-the-red-death

spoonjim 6y ago

The day the shit really hits the fan, the guys who build these bunkers are going to steal them from the billionaires who bought them. Joey might have his own but he'll tell his cousins that they can go beat the shit out of Jeff Bezos and take over his whole bunker.

CamperBob2 6y ago
Pitch this to Amazon Studios and I'll watch it on Prime Vide... uh, never mind.
therockspush 6y ago
I'm realizing now they probably had this same idea and are hiring "Independent Consultants" to pen test their bunkers. If they haven't...
- CamperBob2 6y ago
  How the job starts: Contractor agrees to half payment now, half on completion of bunker How the job ends: Contractor shows up to collect final payment, ends up in a shallow grave on the far side of the retaining wall behind the cistern You don't get to be a billionaire by leaving loose ends lying around...
- spoonjim 6y ago
  Who's likelier to have been in the military and actually seized a position from an adversary? Joey's cousins or Jeff Bezos'? All the pen testing in the world isn't going to help Bill and Melinda and their security team hold their bunker against a larger group of Navy Seals looking for a safe place to ride out the whatever. Or, for that matter, Bill and Melinda's security people looking at the 1 year food supply, looking at Bill and Melinda, and making it a 2 year food supply. The fact is, in a shit hits the fan scenario, money has no value, and thus the world's billionaires become just random dweebs.
  - therockspush 6y ago
    I agree with you, I just think it'll be a scene of paying one half of the population to kill the other. There will be plenty of softer targets meal team six will be going after first, with plenty of fighting to keep them distracted. I'm picturing Bill running the old embrace, extend, and extinguish model until they all just kill each other or die of hunger/radiation/lead poisoning.

davidhyde 6y ago

This reminded me of the book series The Wool Trilogy by Hugh Howey.

deleted 6y ago

[deleted]