The man who owns it says yes, and he's offering shares for just $5,000 down
"It was just several neighbors getting together and just having fun," said Gregg Cawlfield. "It's a blast."Shortly after returning home around 9 p.m., the residents of 840 Golden Hills Road in northwest Colorado Springs heard noises in the attic and called police.-Then: Do I have life insurance? Would I like to have 10 times the life insurance I already have? Would I like to have something even better? Because I can. The structure in which we are now standing was built by AT&T in 1965 to protect telephone infrastructure from a nuclear attack, but now it can protect something far more important: me and my loved ones. For just $50,000 each-half off for kids-I can buy a fractional share of the Terra Vivos underground shelter network, a project that will include at least 19 more "community bunkers," each of them located within 150 to 200 miles of a major American city. Terra Vivos is a concreteand- steel solution to the end times, whether brought about by climate change or nuclear war or even an unavoidable realignment of the cosmic order. Wherever I happen to be at that terrible moment, I'll have a place to live the morning after. "I'm not selling life insurance," Vicino explains. "I'm providing life assurance."Now smaller entrepreneurs are getting involved. Some are building from scratch-Texas-based Radius Engineering, for instance, offers fiberglass shelters that it says can support 2,000 people for five years underground-and others are taking over Cold War relics. "The critical infrastructure is there," says Larry Hall, the project manager of Survival Condo Project, which is converting abandoned Atlas missile silos in Kansas into seven-floor fallout shelters at $1.75 million a floor. Brian Camden, the CEO of the Colorado firm Hardened Structures, says his bunker sales have increased by 40 percent since 2005. He is also helping Vicino renovate his older bunkers and build 13 more bunkers from prefabricated units that Vicino is ordering from a yacht manufacturer in Taiwan.The goal was to show people that recycling is important. To make the point, he converted his basement into a toxic wasteland - complete with green goo falling from the ceiling - to demonstrate what the future has in store for waste-heavy places.Call the writer at 476-1654.To reach the world's first everythingproof underground luxury community, I drive east out of Barstow, California, 50 or so miles into the Mojave Desert, then turn down an unmarked gravel road, park in a barren lot surrounded by razor wire, enter what appears to be a small cinderblock garage, and walk down two steep flights of reinforced-concrete stairs, at which point the project's enthusiastic promoter, Robert Vicino, greets me with an outstretched hand, slams a 3,000-pound blast door behind us, and asks this question: "Do you have a family?"Their garage door was covered with a fake tree. They constructed a glowing green waterfall in the living room, complete with small statues of Al Gore and Bill Clinton riding barrels all the way down.In Monument, Gregg and Jannette Cawlfield once again constructed two pirate ships in their cul-de-sac on the 500 block of Larimer Creek Drive.Now, as 2012 approaches, Vicino says he is actually more worried about 2013, when solar activity is expected to increase significantly. He says an extreme solar storm could fire a catastrophic electromagnetic pulse at Earth, crash the power grid, and thereby trigger anarchy. Even if the world escapes that fate, it could still face an asteroid, or a plague, or a war. Anything could happen. "2012 is just the impetus to bring the project forward because there's a great deal of concern now, but these bunkers could be of use anytime in the next 200 years," Vicino says. "We're building for whenever."Building the Vivos society requires complicated engineering too. Vicino says he has 5,000 additional applicants on file but that he is being selective in order to create a balanced community. "You wouldn't want 200 doctors in one facility and no plumbers," he says. "If the toilet breaks, that could be a real disaster." People can bring guns, but they must check them at the door. If someone misbehaves, the security staff will lock him in a detention center. Vicino is also thinking about survival of the species, not just his customers. He plans to stock each Vivos bunker with a freezer full of DNA samples of as many species as he can collect. Whether it's preserving humanity or reseeding a scorched planet, he asks, "don't you want to be one of the guys repopulating the Earth?"
The good news is that most scientists aren't predicting any immediate trouble. Regarding the Mayan prediction of a planetary alignment that would catastrophically reverse the Earth's magnetic field, Tom Bogdan, the director of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration's Space Weather Prediction Center, notes, "The planets have lined up plenty of times in the past, and we haven't detected any associated catastrophe." And in any case, no planetary alignment is expected in 2012. The only asteroid projected to come near Earth is a 1,000-foot-long rock called Apophis, and that won't be until 2029. Steve Chesley, a scientist with NASA's Near-Earth Object Program, says that even then, the odds of it hitting Earth run 250,000 to 1, adding, "There's nothing that looks particularly threatening out there." Climate change, meanwhile, will probably take several decades to create truly apocalyptic conditions, and in January the Bulletin of Atomic Scientists actually set its doomsday clock back by a full minute.
Author: Cooper, Arnie
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