Do you have your underground fallout shelter ready?

my house that i bought 2 years ago came with a bomb shelter i ended up finding it by accident when fixing the water pump,plumber opened up what i thought was my septic tank and it was a nice clyinder shaped hole in the ground with a block of wood covered in some fake concrete with handles comes out and gives you access to the shelter its only about 400-500 sqf but it was a nice bonus score one for buying a house built in the 1970's.

Not sure of its structual integraty as i am no engineer but it seems pretty solid just weird that it was sorta walled off and not included in the plans for the house at all

Thanks for the link OP, just these past several days I have been wondering about how to go about it. Dont know about the rest but I plan to survive, to live.

Gave a rare flag as I this is why I love ATS - all the info I need and more in this site. Fairly new to the survival forum and its amazing - some real good stuff around here.

reply to post by Evolutionsend

I would like to have one. The ground here is more less rocks. It would have to be blasted, so guess I will just do without for now..

Sort of, but with the economy I couldnt get my blast doors. I figure I'll just do what they show in the old atomic scare films.. fall on the floor,cover my head up with a news paper and stick my butt up in the air.

No need for me to build a shelter.
I have a number of old gold mines around where i live that have 100s to over a 1000 feet of rock over them

Being a old hard rock gold miner and mine search and rescue team member i have maps of many of the good ones.

reply to post by Advantage


Old refrigerator - Lead -

Originally posted by LadySkadi
reply to post by Advantage

 

Old refrigerator - Lead -

LOL!! You'd know that.

Knowing my kids theyd chip the paint off and lick the lead. However, steel and concrete with several feet of earth... BUT.. when I ran the idea about the news paper and butt in the air thing the husband agreed... dunno why.

P.s. I actually have a bunch of old scare tactic and propaganda films on DVD. My faves are always the atomic bomb survival ( they see the mushroom cloud and hide behind a blade of grass) and the Army VD information...... she MIGHT be a DIRTY girl.

When i was a kid, we had a fallout shelter. It was not called a fallout shelter, it was called a "root cellar", but there was little difference, looking back on it. It was dug with hand tools into a hillside, and the walls and ceiling were supported by heavy timbers that were bolted together. Because of bears and other animals, a very heavy wooden door was built to access the cellar. We'd store vegetables from our garden and some fruits in there bedded in straw, and that, along with canned goods my Mom put up and dried and smoked meats, would sustain us throughout the winter.

Our neighbor had a root cellar made of rock and concrete, and it also kept produce from freezing throughout the winter. It wouldn't have been as good of protection in the event of nuclear fallout, but far better than any wooden structure.

That was common for us country folk. A person living in the city might not be in as bad of shape as they might imagine. Suppose a person lived in an apartment -- not on the top floor. They may be able to increase their survivability by covering the windows and doors with as much density of material as they can. I think it's important to mention that in such a situation, the need for uncontaminated water might well quickly become as or more pressing than the fallout itself.

To answer the question in the OP: No, we don't have an underground fallout shelter. We do have acess to a cave or two which are used during hurricane times. These do not block or filter airflow, so their effectiveness as a fallout shelter would be somewhat questionable and dependent upon the location of the strike, wind patterns, etc. We do keep 150 gallons of steralized water in three plastic barrells in addition to two concrete cisterns.

Way back when, I lived in a city, and I felt vulnerable. That is when I began storing food and water. I had a friend who was my survivalist mentor, and he kept a huge stack of otherwise useless phone books, for the purpose of fabricating a "desk shelter" in the event of fallout.

I think it's important to think about, and talk about with your family, even if you believe the probability of needing to respond to such a situation is minimal. Escape routes from your home to ......? How to best shelter in place, if that is your only option. As others have mentioned, printing, reading and understanding the fundamentals of building and using a Kearney Fallout Meter is a good thing to have under your belt. The Ki4U website has a lot of good information.

Just in case, you know?

reply to post by LadySkadi


All you need is to simply be more than 4 feet under the ground, many ideas can work.

reply to post by argentus


Heya Arg Same thing we have.. century plus old historic home and a root cellar.. feet of earth and 2 feet of concrete over it past the main basement area out further into the yard, but accessible by the basement area. Neato house.. with a built in nuke shelter AKA where my canned veggies sleep.

I live in nowhere, nothing to bomb. I would not mind having a SHTF place. We almost built a under ground/earth sheltered house. Tornado came over our trailer house and shook it, my wife said, I didn't feel it but I was sleeping.Wife did not sleep at night on storming weather. No place to buy where my in-laws lived unless someone died. Lived in the trailer 4 years till we could buy something. Right across from the in-laws, we lived next them in our tornado magnet. It took off the top of the tree in the front yard and knocked down a tree in the back yard of where we bought the first house there.

nope dont want one, I'd rather face the nuke with a coke in one hand, cigar in my mouth and the other hand flipping the bird at the warhead.
If the fallout dont get you, the other survivors will

reply to post by Evolutionsend
In my near future, I plan to buy an iHouse (Check it out online if you wish, I highly encourage it) and have it on a rather large plot of land (At least an acre or two) in the middle of the beautiful forests of British Columbia. It can be a self sustaining house and I plan to go completely off the grid with it, or stay on so I can feed back into it and get paid. Now, in the chance that someone attacks Canada (Whoever would be dumb enough to bother), I plan to have a Sea-Can embedded in the ground somewhere on the edge of the property, surrounded by a concrete shell, so that It becomes very stable, and a door made into the top so that It's entry point is at ground level with a ladder bolted into the frame on the inside for easy access to the roof hatch. That way it can't be swept away by a blast, tornado etc. I don't plan to have much in it because that's obviously a temporary shelter that probably won't need to be used. But I'll definitely keep a few essentials there along with canned foods and bedrolls. If I'll be able to afford to have this, I'm definitely doing it. Always wanted to own a personal post apocalypse safe-house ever since I was in my relatives cellar checking out their various wines, BECAUSE WINE IS EPIC. Seriously though, I drink WAY too much wine. What was I talking about? lol

reply to post by Evolutionsend


no i dont , and here is why :

i live in the UK , and "thanks " to my location relative to strategic and military targets - if the UK was targeted by the russians - in an all out strike - i would need a far more sophisticated shelter and long term provisions - than i can possibly afford

further if any dirty / terrorist bomb was detonated on birish soil - it would be far enough away - and of such low yeild - that i would either be unnafected [ dept on weather ] or have a ` head start ` to bug out

...But remember The Road? you have to come out of the shelter at some point unless its a huge T3 mountain side thing that you can happily live in forever. [watching Gilligan's Island.]

if something VERY grave happens to the Earth youre better of dead.