Bunker mentality: will you be ready for the ‘doom boom’?
Luke Mintz uncovers the ‘preppers’ who went below ground during Covid – and hears their plan for survival
In March, as Covid-19 made its journey around the world, a small amount of stockpiling took hold in British supermarkets. Hand sanitiser, paracetamol and dried pasta were in short supply, and it became famously difficult to find loo roll. But even at the peak of demand, only six per cent engaged in hoarding or panic buying, according to industry body Kantar. It was hardly 28 Days Later.
But nearly 5,000 miles away, a few dozen middle-class American families reacted in an altogether more extreme way: rushing to buy access to underground bunkers at Fortitude Ranch, a growing community of doomsday preppers. Established a few years ago by former air force intelligence officer Dr Drew Miller, who has a PhD from Harvard in operations research, the 50-acre ranch is guarded by watchtowers and barbed-wire fences. It stockpiles tinned food, face masks, loo roll, antibiotics and – this being America – guns and ammunition. Their experts track “trigger events” – cataclysmic incidents that might spark a collapse of society.
At various other bunker sites, a handful of families even decided that it was the right moment to descend underground. Most emerged after just a few weeks, once they realised that Covid was not causing the sky to fall. But their willingness to abandon their day-to-day lives at a moment’s notice is evidence of a “second doom boom”, according to archaeologist and urban explorer Bradley radley Garrett, who spent three years s meeting doomsday preppers for his book, Bunker: Building for or the End Times.
“In 2020, 0, we’ve had a taste of what it means to have our lives upended,” ded,” says Garrett from om his home in Los Angeles. geles. “We’ve built uilt a society now w that is very dependent ndent upon international rnational trade and fragile supply lines.” es.”
We have e long harboured da a morbid fascination with how our world might end. As early as 1200BC in
Cappadocia, in what is now Turkey, the Hittites carved subterranean shelters into the sides of volcanoes. In the Roman city of Pompeii, a wealthy resident chiselled a hidden chamber beneath his villa, which was preserved by the eruption of Vesuvius in 79AD. In the 19th century, the dark wri writing of HG Wells reflected a fear that new technology might usher in the end of life as people knew it.
But the first real “doo “doom boom” arrived in the Sixties Sixties, when President John F Kennedy urged America Americans to prepare for th the threat of nuclear arma armageddon by building fallout shelters in t their gardens. Th The British governmen government also built bun bunkers to protect officials in the event of a Sovi Soviet nuclear stri strike. The m most fa famous is Burlington, a 35-acre complex 120ft underground in Wiltshire. Containing 60 miles of underground roads, the site could accommodate 4,000 people for three months, including the Cabinet. It also housed a BBC recording studio.
Now Garrett thinks we have reached our second period of existential dread. Cold War-era shelters are being sold – only for them to be snapped up by modern “dread merchants”, as Garrett calls them, who kit them out and sell them on to super-rich clients from New York and Silicon Valley (plus a few Europeans). Some are open to those of more modest means: a bare-bones membership at Fortitude Ranch, which entitles you to a dormitory bunk-bed in the event of the apocalypse, costs $1,000 (£763) per year.
Larry Hall, an ex-defence contractor, purchased a former US government Cold War shelter for $300,000 in 2008. Built in Kansas in the Sixties to withstand a nuclear missile 100 times more powerful than the bomb dropped on Nagasaki, by 2010 Hall had converted it into “Survival Condo”, a luxury shelter for the super-rich, in which 75 people can theoretically
weather five years underground – after which they would emerge to rebuild society.
Garrett received rare access to the condo. “When the lift doors opened, I couldn’t suppress a laugh,” he writes. “In front of us, four storeys underground in central Kansas, was a supermarket complete with shopping baskets, shelves, cold cabinets, an espresso machine. Like Willy Wonka... Larry flipped a light switch to illuminate a 50,000-gallon indoor swimming pool flanked by a rock waterfall.”
Tyler Allen, a housing developer from Florida, paid $3million for one of Hall’s flats. He told in 2017: “They don’t put tinfoil on your head if you’re the president and you go to Camp David [the ultra-secure presidential residence in Maryland]. But they do if you have the means and you take steps to protect your family should a problem occur.”
Like most outlandish trends, the extreme examples are mostly found in America. But Garrett thinks that “doom boom” culture is coming to Britain, too. When Burlington was put on the market for £1.5million in 2016, there was interest from a Californian developer called Robert Vicino, CEO of the Vivos Group, which describes itself as “the backup plan for humanity”.
But Burlington’s status as a Grade II listed site means that any buyer would have to maintain its historic integrity.
Garrett also gained insight into what is keeping the world’s elites awake at night. Many of the preppers mentioned the potential for catastrophic climate change, while the threat of a more severe pandemic now looms large. “This is only a midlevel crisis,” says Garrett of Covid-19. “If the lethality rate of this virus was 10 per cent, instead of less than one per cent, [prepping] would be extremely important.”
The preppers also have a great deal to say about artificial intelligence, described by Toby Ord’s The Precipice as an “existential threat”.
It is easy to roll your eyes at the eccentricity. Pessimists have always been among us, from the internet doomsters who predicted the world would end suddenly in 2012 because of a bizarre interpretation of the Mayan calendar, to the person who stands on the street corner declaring: “The end is nigh.” And that was exactly the sort of “lone wolf, secretive, paranoid fringe culture” Garrett expected to find.
But his mind changed. While he still thinks the elites spending millions harbour an “overly pessimistic view”, he was impressed by lower-key, cheaper versions of prepping: communities where people assembled to teach each other basic survival skills; how to grow vegetables and mend clothes, rather than going underground.
If we work together, he thinks, there is no reason that a future global catastrophe has to become an apocalypse. Well, that’s something.
Bunker: Building for the End Times by Bradley Garrett is published by Allen Lane (£20)
‘Four storeys under the ground, was a supermarket with cold cabinets and a coffee machine’