Waiting for the End of the World

One of those designer-competition shows a few years ago...was it Top Design? I don't remember which...paired off designers to compete in decorating a fallout shelter. Some of them were quite nice.

These shelters might be OK for short term stays (say a week up to a couple of months). But unless you could live underground indefintley, why would anyone even want to survive "The Apocalypse"?

Nice find Miss C.

Gee, I don't know about that Gail. I like solitude and could probably live like that permanently.

I'd like to have such a shelter just as a kind of sneaky secret basement under my house! If you use it like that, it can add something special to your house, some nice touch, like a "secret" doorway. With the added touch that it is fully bomb-proof or something like that.

I'm with you, Foreigner1. I think it would be cool to have one for just in case of a catastophe, but I'd want it to be an extra useable space for regular day to day use,too. Maybe it could function as a wine cellar or rec room or something when there wasn't a crisis going on? Then I wouldn't feel silly if nothing catastrophic ever happened. If no one dropped the bomb, I'd still have gotten a pretty sweet bonus room out of it.

GailPink, certainly many "fallout shelters" are built simply for mental paranoia comfort; simple holes for reassurance. However the inevitable thought for anyone who's truly serious about survival shelters always goes through a period of "could I actually stay here for weeks...months...years?" as they're preparing.

I've heared accounts of people who were warzones from Germany, London, Korea and Iraq that endured bombings while they took cover in shelters. They all told same stories about the hell of hearing and feeling the bombs fall upto the point that it shook the shelter so hard that it caused injuries. The panic inside the shelters that in one instance made a man kill his whole fammily before he himself was killed by others. The oxigen-deprivation and temperatures that went up so high that people (children and old folks lots of times first) suffocated around them and died. And then to discover that the shelter infact had become a trap because the building on top of it had blocked any way out when it disintegrated. Or the even more gruesome hell when finally they got out and had to go into a world that was totally destructed and or on fire and burned up to the point that some who survived in the shelter took their own lives because they couldn't stand what they saw.

These shelters however well-constructed and prepared they can be, seem to be mixed blessings and curses...

Great point and history lesson Foreigner1.

I was leaning more to living in a well ventilated one not in times of threat or bombing.

But hey, I'm pretty much a hermit anyway.

There's one of these in my house (I didn't build it)It's basically a sub basement. Since it's there, I stock it with stuff. Basically enough supplies for the family to last a month. I doubt it would survive a direct bombing of my house but I don't live in a city so I can't see the strategic advantage of bombing my house. I can say it is mentally nice knowing it's available. Imagine tomorrow the Government says "OMG H1N1 has mutated and now has an 80% kill rate! Everyone must stay indoors for 1 month to prevent spreading." Everyone is panicking, I'm sipping beer saying, "Right, I got that covered."