survivalists

Bradley Garrett’s tour of bunker sites and the people who own them is a snapshot of the way the most paranoid react to the pandemic.

A “bunker mentality”  means a refusal to look around and change opinions in the light of changing facts. However, it is possible that the rational response to the current state of the world is to retreat into …. a  bunker?

In his book Bunker: Building for End Times, (buy it in UK)Bradley Garrett, an American “experimental geographer” and “urban explorer”, visits people whose response to the proliferation of threats these days by digging in.

In Switzerland, says Garrett, there is bunker space for 8.6 million people. And North Korea “is the most bunkered society in the history of the Earth”.

In America we meet families 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”, says Garrett.

“In 2020, we’ve had a taste of what it means to have our lives upended,” says Garrett from his home in Los Angeles.

“We’ve built a society now that is very dependent upon international trade and fragile supply lines.”

We have long harboured 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 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 “doom boom” arrived in the Sixties, when President John F Kennedy urged Americans to prepare for the threat of nuclear armageddon by building fallout shelters in their gardens. The British government also built bunkers to protect officials in the event of a Soviet nuclear strike. The most 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. …