Via an email tip from Peter. Who found them at Meme-etic – According To Hoyt:


I’m not saying they are wrong. But just so you know… The deeper you go the tougher the problems with:
- Water leakage
- Flat roof expense
- Sewer drains or septic drain fields
- Construction excavation footprint size
- Cranky building inspectors
If you just build the whole house underground, you can avoid the duplication plus save bigly on utilities. Still have to deal with building inspectors but this can be overcome especially if you retrofit some of your special enhancements.
Does a dome shape solve leakage and flat roof woes?
There are still water issues. But the strength is vastly improved. Construction is more difficult, though.
A few years ago I saw somewhere on the Internet a photo of a USAF missile launch bunker under construction. It basically looked like an oversized tank — a building-sized steel elllipsoid with some access tubes welded to it. Looked like a great solution for strength and water tightness, not so great for ease of construction. I suppose you’d get some shipyard people to build such a thing. Or someone else who is good at structural welding.
A good cliff face with a roomy overhang that can be shaped and made deeper might be a good alternative.
Or building on grade, then banking earth against the outer walls and thin layer on top. Cutting a hillside about 4′ deep, then building half underground invites shorter walls sticking up in the air. Fast growing shrubbery planted will help remove evidence but your entry – exit requires some camoflauge to stay hidden.
Straight vertical wall edges create shadows that re not natural. Rounded shapes clumped together appear to be more tree-like and avoid attention.
3 tiers. Front is living, dining, kitchen, master suite. Middle is extra bedrooms with backup kitchen. 5 foot thick wall between this and front. Back is storage with emergency exit. Appropriate ventilation and plumbing. Front can be fairly open and hardened to preference. Middle and back completely buried. If possible middle should have hand pump. Propane hidden away from house. No way to make generator or solar bank inconspicuous. Generator makes too much noise so intermittent use to charge battery. Solar could be hidden in clearing away from house but then hard to guard.
Keep in mind that the building inspectors get cranky when living areas, such as bedrooms and living rooms, don’t have two independent exits.
Emergency exit in rear. Middle tier could be configured as storage with conversation when SHTF.
I lived in a house in CA that artfully got around the bedroom exit codes by having an atrium(?) in the center of the house, with a window for each of several bedrooms, with a door into the house, and also the garage. I don’t recall why they didn’t have external windows. Might have been due to several bathrooms grouped together.
Drones and satellite images (Google Earth) make everything much harder to hide.
Not to mention ground piercing radar so stay gray.
RE: The “build into a hillside” / “earth berming” ideas – could such an arrangement approximate “underground” enough to make it successful?
Option 1: Dig into a hillside from one side to the other, recessing the front and rear walls enough to completely contain them within the hillside and provide fully enclosed walkway entrances so the only visible portions would be a single doorway at each end, or;
Option 2: Build the same thing entirely above grade and berm it with 12-15 feet of earth to achieve the same thing.
In either case the “entrance hallways” behind the exposed doors at each end could be as long as was necessary to provide adequate shelter from whatever threat was perceived. The “build above grade and berm it” would be easier to include drainage, wiring/plumbing/DWV etc. access and probably cheaper – skilled trades would be needed for design and construction, but dirt hauling and subsequent earth moving would be cheaper that full below-grade construction. The trick might be to find, or make, a suitably sized depression in which to construct the house. Or, lacking that, moving enough dirt that the overburden appears to be a natural occurrence.
Depends on the threat. If you are going to be in the blast radius of a nuke, no. Pretty easy to make a fallout shelter out of something like this if you do the ventilation right and have adequate supplies. The earth sheltered walls are bulletproof and (external) fire resistant. Also few burglars are going to dig through them. The external facing surfaces are going to have to be hardened by more conventional means.
Hmmmm….If the earth berming / built into a hillside as positioned to place the gentle rise in the most likely direction of a nuclear blast, that would be better than the flat “door face” sides facing that way.
And, I just remembered, read it somewhere but can’t remember where, that concrete mixed to a 5000 PSI or higher strength is waterproof. Hardening the external faces could be achiever with both higher PSI concrete mix and thickness; the form work cost would be the same, or close to it, for 16 inches thick compared to 8-10 inches, the only difference would be the amount of concrete used. I do not know what the minimum thickness would be for exposed vertical walls to successfully resist blast damage from X kt/mt nuke at Y km distance.
Windows and doors will be the “weak links” in defending against blasts. Natural lighting and ventilation are required by the building inspectors, so blast resistance is “challenging.”
There are “riot shutters” used in Europe and 3rd World. Friends got those by a building inspector in AZ. Really expensive though.
More generally, though that is why you have the multiple tiers. SHTF and you retreat from outer tier. From what you said earlier, fallout would seem more likely than blast as a threat. Plus outlaws after the crash and criminals now.
Found some articles and pictures. I may be wrong about the “steel tank” thing, the second photo looks more like a tank-shaped structure made of concrete. The point about the strong shape still applies, though.
https://www.loveproperty.com/gallerylist/250865/incredible-cold-war-missile-silo-conversions
https://apnews.com/article/nuclear-intercontinental-ballistic-missile-minuteman-sentinel-321d5a34c141352f4fae4a779535ebbe
BTW, not exactly the same thing, but 30-ish years ago I read in the paper an article about a retired off-site document storage site, in Pepperell, MA. We realized soon after that it’s right next door to our veterinarian at the time. It looks like an empty lot, but if you looked more closely you’d see a driveway descending down a ramp, ending at a big door. I think it was for sale, don’t remember what happened to it.
Why would you tell the local “inspectors” such a structure even exists. That is biggest and worst violation of OpSec possible as the plans for and existence of such a structure becomes public record. If you can afford such a luxury it is far better to do it “under the table” using a construction crew from FAR AWAY.
Construction people won’t work on it without a building permit. So you have to do it yourself. The power company won’t connect you without an inspection. So you have to have a cover building constructed with permits. This increases the cost and complexity.
You can do it yourself with solar, wind, small hydro, etc. Or you can build in Idaho County (I’m in Clearwater County), which doesn’t require building permits
I needed it built quicker than i could do it myself. I also decided Clearwater County wasn’t a primary adversary to be worried about.
In the senerios I’m concerned about, the conventional path is good enough. Besides, most of the construction people and inspectors in the county share the same concerns the underground defends against.
Another thing is that the community is small and tight enough that most of the county knew something different was going on with the big pile of dirt in the first month of construction. Everyone started talking and asking questions.
I decided it was better to have lots of friends than lots of suspicion.