Vivos Founder Builds an Underground City Where You Can Ride Out the Apocalypse 150
pigrabbitbear writes "'I was inspired with a very powerful message around 1980 that I needed to build a shelter for 1,000 people deep underground to survive something that was coming that was going to be an extinction event,' he explained in an extensive phone interview. 'That's it, that's all I had. But it was powerful. So powerful that I had a successful business with 100 employees and I took time off to go up into the mountains and search on weekends looking for an underground mine or cave that could be cartoned and converted.' Today, Vicino is the owner and founder of Vivos, a company that sells space in luxury survival complexes around the country. It's what he likes to call 'life assurance'--mini underground cities, in effect, for people ride out the end of civilization in a community setting with good food, television, even a potential dating pool. He says demand has increased 1,000 percent this year compared to last—itself a 1,000 percent increase over the year before."
Welcome to the Vault (Score:5, Interesting)
This is so Fallout that it hurts.
Re:To ride out the end of civilization (Score:2, Interesting)
There are people out there with the attitude of "why work and stockpile food when your armaments can ensure food from your neighbors?"
The problem is that in the country, people need skills like knowing how to grow crops, irrigation, weather, what types of livestock are best for the land and for trade, how to build a farm for most effective growth, how to handle coyotes, pumas, and other predators, dealing with rats and other vermin, maintaining a livable home, making sure one has enough firewood, making sure drinking water is sanitary, basic sanitation, first aid, basic/advanced medical knowledge, knowing plants and what is edible versus what will kill you, how to store food for longest life and minimizing rot and rodent inroads, how to get animals and crops to a trading post, bazaar, or farmer's market, how to keep vehicles working when the nearest mechanic would be days if one had to walk, how to deal with two-legged vermin, how to deal with trash, burying the dead so it doesn't cause a sanitation hazard, keeping grass low to protect against snakes, and many other things that if listed would be paragraphs long.
A person in the city just needs cunning, and they can thrive. Knowing how to manipulate other people is the sole skill needed to eke out a living in urban areas. One can have a well-off life being an absolute parasite and produce nothing.
Now, take the city people, and try to make them deal with "real" life. Not a life with food trucks coming in at all hours to restock the nearest Starbucks or Wal-Mart, but having to actually grow/kill what they eat. With no other skillsets, they will go the route of what they can seize by force. Even if a farm is well defended, unless one has a militia with 24/7 guards, someone will be coming in after dark to set fire to buildings just out of "if I can't have it, nobody can" attitude. We saw that with Katrina where people's houses were turned into their funeral pyres because they defended their place successfully, but couldn't stay up 24/7 or see people intruding at night. Yes, those people will starve, but they will take the food producers with them.
What is one's best bet? Live at least 50-100 miles away from a city. That is enough distance that average cars will not have enough gas to cover, and cars that do will be stuck in permanent traffic jams (the last hurricane from Houston had people trying to leave three days in advance... and roads were so bad that there were people still stuck on the interstates when the winds hit.) So, while the hive-people fight each other for scraps of fuel, areas past the no-man's land will be relatively safe.
Looks like an old Bell System facility (Score:4, Interesting)
The Nebraska facility is almost certainly a former Bell System facility. It has a classic AT&T microwave tower and high bays for switching equipment. AT&T used to have underground centers across the country for survivable communications. Here's one that is for sale. [undergroun...resses.com]
There are a surprising number of bunkers for sale in the US. I see some on the market that were being offered a decade ago. The costs of refurbishing and operating a big military facility in the middle of nowhere are high, and few people bother. Some have done so, and then realized they don't really want to live there. [silohome.com]