Billionaire Bunkers: How the Super-Rich Prepare for Disaster
Disaster preparedness has increased in popularity over the last few decades. No longer are you considered odd for maintaining a healthy amount of emergency supplies, especially if you live in a region where natural disasters are an ever-present risk. Add in social unrest and fears of global conflict, disease, and famine, and being prepared just makes good sense.
The everyday Joes and Janes aren’t the only ones making sure they have the food, water, and fuel resources to survive a disaster. The wealthy are increasingly concerned with emergency preparedness. So, if you’re a billionaire preparing for disaster, what do you do, especially if money is no object? How about buying property in billionaire bunkers?
Communal Safe houses of the Rich and Famous
Just off a major highway in Germany lies Vivos Europa One, a massive facility built by the Russians during the Cold War to house weapons and munitions. The facility is tough enough to survive almost any disaster you can imagine, with the possible exception of a direct strike by a planet-busting asteroid.
Capable of withstanding nuclear blasts, radiation, biological and chemical agents, earthquakes, armed attack, and electromagnetic pulses, Vivos Europa One is where many a billionaire preparing for disaster plans on waiting out the apocalypse. With communal areas, the ability to grow its own food, zoological specimens, and an archive for the world’s greatest treasures, the complex boasts private living areas of 5,000 square feet which the uber-wealthy prepper can customize to his or her exacting tastes. Can’t afford to get in? (trust us, you can’t). At least you can donate your genetic material to the facility’s DNA bank.
Europa One isn’t the only old military facility being remodeled to meet the needs of the pampered prepper. The Oppidum in the Czech Republic offers equally extravagant 5-star survival quarters. Closer to home, the Survival Condo Project in Kansas was once an Atlas F nuclear missile silo.
The Survival Condo Project will let you ride out the End Days in style, although its 920 square-foot, $1.5 million private quarters seem cramped in comparison to its European cousins. Still, a billionaire preparing for disaster must make some sacrifices.
Will Billionaire Bunkers Work?
Over the short term, certainly, billionaire bunkers will provide their residents with adequate protection, even if they sound more like something out of a post-apocalypse video game than real disaster prepping. There’s a few problems with taking a luxury approach to survival, however.
No matter what you pay for it, a billionaire bunker does its occupant no good if you’re outside the bunker when things go south. Sure, the Survival Condo Project has evacuation teams to pick up those who can’t get to the shelter under their own steam, but the team only has a four-hundred-mile range, and in a true catastrophe, will they do their job? Would you blame them if, instead, they holed up for their own safety? And as they’d be well-armed, who would tell them otherwise?
The need for transport to billionaire bunkers—or a nice safe location out of the country—is the reason many wealthy preppers have fully-gassed planes and helicopters on standby (we swear, we are not making this up). And as your average pilot might be more interested in saving his own family, some billionaires have arranged for pilots and their immediate family to have space in their bunkers.
So let’s assume our billionaire makes it to the bunker. The world above ground is plagued by civil unrest, disease, starvation, nuclear winter, radiation, or a worldwide natural disaster. Those of us unlucky enough to be topside are living by our wits, the resources we were wise enough to amass, and our skills.
While the wealthy have certainly amassed a huge amount of resources in their billionaire bunkers, very few of them seem be considering the skills and abilities they’d need to survive. They’re going to rely on the bunker’s doctors, agricultural experts, soldiers, HVAC technicians, electricians, and plumbers to keep the facility running.
How long do you think the “little guys” will tolerate serving a group of people whose wealth and power means nothing in the event of long-lasting disruption of society? Probably not that long.
Huh. Maybe the meek will inherit the world after all.
Resources
http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2017/01/30/doomsday-prep-for-the-super-rich
