Maverick's World

Where do you build your perfect survival bunker?

When people go to great lengths to hide something - they end up revealing whatever it is they are trying to keep secret.

Let's assume you are rich and have more money than you need to keep the act of being rich going. You want to invest in something will assure your survival even when SHTF.  Even if the entire world was destroyed, you (and your chosen companions) would survive.

This puts you in the market for a doomsday bunker.

Every such bunker needs three things

1) Captive water supply
2) Captive energy supply
3) Overburden.

Most people would say - that bunker needs to be in the middle of nowhere, however when it comes to bunkers isolation is not a good thing. Ultimately the bunker needs staff to operate. You need to have janitors to clean, service staff to keep it in working order. These have to be people you can trust, so a ethnically and religiously narrowed base is preferable to diverse population with no unifying principle. If you don't pick your staff carefully, then who knows, when SHTF - they'll kill you and take your bunker for themselves. So you need people you think you can control.

Also when you dig the earth to great depths, you need a place to keep all the soil you dig out. You also routinely encounter groundwater, so you need a place to pump it out to (usually a river or lake). It is possible to truck all the extra soil away, but it is smarter to just pile it on top of the actual bunker - that way you get your overburden for free.

Captive water supply and energy can be combined in a place that offers a nice lake or river and has a dam already built. If there are forests nearby one could access a source of wood and other biomass for heating purposes. Any mines or mineral deposits with associated refining infrastructure are big plus.

A relatively smart rich person will create a bunker, pile the soil on top and then put a mansion on top of the mound. The mansion is mostly camouflage, it costs a lot of money to put an underground facility in place (lots of drilling and stabilizing the cavity etc...) and without a mansion on top with ridiculously garish fittings, you draw attention to your hole in the ground.

So that makes it relatively easy to locate such facilities. Just go to Zillow and look for where the mansions are. Take the ones that are close to a lake but sit close to or on a mound of earth.

Naturally the companies that build such sites tend to be quite discreet but they are also end up becoming great friends with the rich people they "help out". Since rich people also have powerful political friends, the quickest way to see the builders of such facilities, is to spot the ones with unusual public relationships with political figures. Like ones that get public contracts when they clearly don't deserve it.

Now.. cough cough Whitefish cough cough ... excuse me, I think I need to get a glass of water.

posted by maverick @ 5:43 AM