Boo!
Old Trooper sends us a link from CNN Money (the last place I look for investment advice, by the way) which reports that “doomsday bunkers” sales are skyrocketing. Of course, by “skyrocketing” they mean that eight more people want bunkers than last year.
Northwest Shelter Systems, which offers shelters ranging in price from $200,000 to $20 million, has seen sales surge 70% since the uprisings in the Middle East, with the Japanese earthquake only spurring further interest. In hard numbers, that’s 12 shelters already booked when the company normally sells four shelters per year.
“Sales have gone through the roof, to the point where we are having trouble keeping up,” said Northwest Shelter Systems owner Kevin Thompson.
Yeah, eight are “through the roof”. It seems that people are frightened because of the problems the Japanese are having. That and for some reason the revolts in the Middle East.
People are so easily frightened – like the rocket surgeons who are buying up all of the potassium iodine pills because of the combination of an earthquake and tsunami hitting a nuclear power plant in Japan. How often has that happened in the past? How much more likely is it to happen now that it’s happened once? How much more likely is it to happen tomorrow than it was today?
They’d be better off being scared of this administration destroying the economy with reckless abandon and the union thugs in Wisconsin disregarding civility. But I guess it’s easier to be scared of things for which you can take pills to protect yourself and bunkers from which you can lock the world out.
Category: Barack Obama/Joe Biden
I’m kind of a bunker fancier (alas, because of the cost of renovation, I’ll never be an owner unless I win a lottery), and I can say just from my web contacts, they sell slowly but steadily, particularly the old Atlas E sites. The bigger sites, like the Titan I’s, just sort of sit, not just because of purchase and refurbishment cost, but because of difficult laws concerning contamination and usage. There is also a problem with flooding in many of the older sites.
And for my own curiosity, I would love to have a demographic of the folks who bought all the potassium iodine pills. Were these old folks? Hippies? Yuppies? Who? I didn’t know if we had a problem coming or not when I heard about the radiation from Japan, so I got on line and did about 5 minutes worth of reading, and voila! I went on about my business, and I don’t have an iodine tablet in the house. Why couldn’t they do that??
PN; I’ve been fascinated with the old missile silos. I read a story here a couple of years back about a guy who bought one for very cheap and did a refurb on it. That would be cool as hell! I believe that it was an old Titan site. I would love to know where the Atlas sites are that are for sale. Not that I could afford one, until that lottery thingy kicks in (I’m in the same boat as you), but it would just be interesting to see what’s out there. Plus, the land around one, if it came in the deal would give me my fortress of solitude and shooting range 🙂
Here you go, Old Trooper; all things silo!
Twentieth Century Castles, LLC:
http://www.missilebases.com/
Pete is the go-to guy for the Titans:
http://www.chromehooves.net/Titan_Epitaph_main.htm
Atlas Missile Site Coordinates:
http://asuwlink.uwyo.edu/~jimkirk/atlas.html
Thanks PN!! I appreciate it.
…and just FYI for anyone looking at the Twentieth Century Castles site: it’s currently being updated. You’ll have to go back to it later on, and the links for the sites that are for sale will be available.
I glanced at the bottle for my (adult) gummy vitamins the other day and noticed that potassium iodine is already in them…Wonder if these people bothered to read the labels on the supplements they already take?
No, they don’t, Miss Ladybug. They also have no clue why potasium iodine works, or how much of it to take. If you’re not careful, the iodine pills can do you more damage than the radiation sickness it’s meant to treat, but they don’t know THAT, either.
Another personal story: I worked in a hospital that was in a city that was popular with the faith healers back in the ’70’s. Whenever they’d come to town, our ER would gear up for that weekend…because of all the folks who’d be “healed” and throw away their insulin and heart meds. Sure enough, we’d get three or four diabetics in diabetic crisis and a couple of heart failures…
It just goes to show how foolish people can be sometimes.
I would love to have an old silo for my lair. The craze of the potassium iodine reminds me of the cipro craze in DC. If people would bother to read up on Anthrax they would know that the most dagerous kind is inhaled. If they aren’t in areas where it is then they don’t have anything to worry about.
I learned a long time ago that the only thing I need to do is drop to the floor and crawl under my desk to be protected against all things nuclear. Now I just have to find a school desk big enough to cover all parts of me!!!
If a bunker and a pill will solve all of my problems, sign me up for both.
Thee problem with a silo as a fortress of solitude is that, given the pure, unadulterated paranoia of the CHICOMs, NORKs, and Even the Ruskies, every last one of them has at least one MIRV targeted on it. They may have been designed to survive a near-miss, but were talking about a nuke… from space. They were designed to protect the missile, and the firing crew, long enough to launch–not much more. If you survive the blast, and the pressure, and the heat, eventually the gamma rays will kill you.
I’m just going to find out who these folks are that have $20M to spend on a rabbit hole, park my truck in front of the door once they are inside, and fort up in their above-ground house and wait for the zombie hordes to arrive for target practice. Every now and again I imagine I’ll do something fun like plug up all the air intakes, too.
Fill in the blanks:
A (______) and his (______) are soon (______).
Chuck; if you stop by my man cave, you won’t go thirsty. I’ll leave a couple cases of coldies for ya, because I know killing zombies works up a thirst.
#9 Toothless Dawg:
Advice: Skip the school desk; go straight to one of the 1960 – 1970’s metal army desks. I have one, and they’re GREAT! 😉