nuclear-news

Frenzy for selling bunkers, but they might not be much use, really.

‘Our top search term is nuclear’: US bunker sales soar as anxiety over Russia rises,  Guardian, Bradley Garrett, 31 Mar 2022

Gary Lynch is the CEO of Rising S Company in Texas. When I first visited his warehouse in 2018, I watched his crew assemble, deliver, and bury a handful of bunkers in people’s backyards every month. The bunkers are thick plate steel boxes that are welded together like a giant Lego set – the size of the bunker limited only by a client’s resources.

Sales, he says, have spiked 1,000% since that time as anxieties around the pandemic, civil unrest, climate change and war have driven more buyers to his company………………………………………..

Business has never been so good. My inbox has been flooded in recent weeks by emails from preppers sensing an opportunity. One from the California-based Vivos Group, cautioned “…with all hell now breaking loose in Ukraine, and the beginning of what may be WW3, you are probably wishing you had secured a Vivos bunker”…………………………………………………………

 bunkers fail to keep out many other threats.

Larry Hall, the developer who built Survival Condo, the most expensive and lavish private bunker in the world, almost died last year after contracting the Delta variant. A bunker doesn’t act as an effective bulwark against disease, and he never ended up pulling residents in and shutting the blast doors in any case, given the incremental and unpredictable spread of the virus.

It’s also the case that many of those who sell bunkers meant to assuage our anxiety are shysters. A few of the bunkers I have tried to visit never existed. The Oppidum in the Czech Republic and Vivos Europa One in Germany, for instance, turned out to be little more than a CGI pipe dreams. (The latter, offering $2m apartments in “shell condition” is described on the company’s website as “operational” but “ready for improvements”.) Some of these places had collected deposits from clients and never finished building. In one case, at Trident Lakes in Texas, the founder, John Eckerd, was arrested by federal agents after accepting a $200,000 wire transfer for the build-out that he thought was coming from a Colombian drug cartel. Eckherd was sentenced to 15 months in federal prison.

That’s why many of the preppers I’ve met are moving away from purchasing bunkers and towards a simpler model for resilience that mitigates almost all threats: they’ve sought rural properties where long-term stability could be achieved in off-grid communities, ranches and rural redoubts, where they learned to grow food away from (mostly urban) areas that are both geopolitical targets and sites for social friction……………………………..

March 31, 2022 - Posted by Christina Macpherson | 2 WORLD, safety