Underground Survival Shelter Builder

When looking at underground survival shelters, the honeycomb pattern, concrete bunker, bomb shelter design is really intriguing.

Concrete Bunkers

With this unique bomb shelter design, you can create a simple underground room.... or you can connect the individual concrete bunkers to make a maze of rooms. Some folks are only looking for a simple one room bunker to flee to or to store their survival gear and food at.

Others are thinking much more long term and are placing these rooms in clusters of two or three or as many as SEVEN of them in a honeycomb fashion. I guess they have the right design because the bees could teach us a whole lot about community and colony living!

Because of the ability to assemble these underground survival shelters almost ANYWHERE, there are some survivalists that have a home under their home. Imagine having a COMPLETE hideaway home RIGHT UNDERNEATH your home you are currently living in! With a few hidden entrances to this underground shelter system, you can be totally safe no matter what happens to your home above ground.

Plus, you are able to totally furnish it out with survival gear as you go along. The concrete style bunker shelters are really a no-brainer for anyone wanting to have some kind of safe underground survival shelter to flee to, that is BOMB safe.

Many of this style of concrete bunkers are made of a combination of steel and concrete, making them 40% stronger than concrete cast at a normal building site.

Private and Inconspicuous

One of most important factors when building ANY survival shelter, whether ABOVE ground or UNDER ground, is that you really don't want all your neighbors to know what is going on.

Underground bunkers are advantageous for several reasons; they provide the added protection of being below the surface thus escaping a major portion of the effects from blasts and radiation, they can be pre-stocked with provisions to sustain their occupants for several months and, most important, they can be located connected to, or adjacent to, a client’s primary residence, thus allowing for quick evacuation.

The bunkers can be designed for either Single Use or Multi Use. A Single Use bunker is used only in case of an emergency and is a stand alone design. The advantage with the Single Use if that may be readily accepted by the local building authority having jurisdiction because it is not required to provide normal every day accommodations for people.

A Multi Use bunker can be used for other purposes (i.e.; store rooms, wine cellars, etc.,) and this ability is sometimes more appealing. However, it must then be designed to accommodate everyday ingress/egress and building code requirements.

The doors must be at least as strong as the walls. The usual design is a trap-door, to minimize the size and expense. To reduce the weight, the door is normally constructed of steel, with a fitted steel lintel and frame. Very thick wood also serves, and is more resistant to heat because it chars rather than melts. If the door is on the surface and will be exposed to the blast wave, the edge of the door is normally counter-sunk in the frame so that the blast wave or a reflection cannot lift the edge. A bunker should have two doors. Door shafts may double as ventilation shafts to reduce digging.

In bunkers inhabited for prolonged periods, large amounts of ventilation or air conditioning must be provided in order to prevent ill effects of heat. In bunkers designed for war-time use, manually-operated ventilators must be provided because supplies of electricity or gas are unreliable. One of the most efficient manual ventilator designs is the Kearny Air Pump. Ventilation openings in a bunker must be protected by blast valves. A blast valve is closed by a shock wave, but otherwise remains open. One form of expedient blast valve is tyre-treads nailed or bolted to frames strong enough to resist the maximum overpressure.

If a bunker is in a built-up area, it may have to include water-cooling or an immersion tub and breathing tubes to protect inhabitants from fire storms.

Bunkers must also protect the inhabitants from normal weather, including rain, summer heat and winter cold. A normal form of rainproofing is to place plastic film on the bunker's main structure before burying it. Thick (5-mil or 0.13 mm), inexpensive polyethylene film serves quite well, because the overburden protects it from degradation by wind and sunlight.