Storage bunkers for sale: Underground Bunker and Shelters, Survival Bunkers for Sale Online

How to Build an Underground Bunker in 9 Steps

Personalized underground bunkers became popular during the Cold War when the threat of nuclear war was imminent. Luckily for all of us, nuclear armageddon didn’t come to pass.
However, the current pandemic has seen a rise in the interest of underground shelters.

Although you can buy a premade underground bunker, they’re expensive and may not meet all of your needs. If you want to protect yourself and your loved ones from a disaster, follow these steps to build an underground bunker, or jump to the full infographic version down below.

1. Get Permission

The most important thing to do is to get the proper permits. Permits are used to ensure safety for you and everyone around you during the project. Failure to obtain or comply with a permit can be expensive and sometimes dangerous if you aren’t careful.

You don’t want to start digging and building an underground bunker only to be stopped and forced to pay a hefty fine. In some cases, you’ll be forced to remove or undo any project you set out to do.

To obtain the appropriate permits, you need to go to your local building department or building official. You will need to show them plans of what you are going to be doing, so make sure you have your blueprint (more on that later) and a map showing where you’re going to be working.

Permits can vary depending on where you live; for example, if you’re building your bunker in San Diego, CA, the types of permits you’ll need are:

• Grading Permit: Grading is required when a project may alter the topography of a property due to excavations or fillings. A preliminary evaluation is needed to make sure you aren’t building on environmentally sensitive lands and to assess the feasibility of the project you’re conducting.
• Building Permit: This is to ensure the construction project complies with local, state and federal law.
• Discretionary Permit: When a project has the possibility of impacting the surrounding area due to the proposed use, location or design feature, a discretionary permit is needed.
• Plumbing Permit: If you’re adding plumbing for your underground bunker (more on that later), a plumbing permit is necessary.
• Electrical Permit: If you’re going to install any electrical wiring or equipment, you’ll need an electrical permit to make sure everything is wired safely and correctly.

No matter where you’re located, however, you need to call 811 before you dig so that you don’t accidentally break an underground utility line. Doing so can be costly and dangerous to your health. It’ll take a few days, but a locater can identify the placement of any underground utility.

2. Choose the Location

Once you have your permits in place, the next thing you need to do is to consider your bunker location. It needs to be someplace you’ll be safe and private if secrecy is an essential factor.

Avoid any place that is close to large bodies of water as they’re more likely to flood, which can damage the structural integrity of your bunker. Likewise, avoid any flammable place.

Try to avoid digging in a place that is surrounded by trees and vegetation. Trenching near trees means that you’ll be dealing with a complicated web of roots that’ll be difficult to cut through. Not only that but cutting through these roots can be detrimental to the local geography.

Likewise, you need to avoid digging into any utility lines. If you called 811, you’d already know exactly where the utilities are located. Avoid digging on top or with 18-24″ on all sides of the utility line. If you can’t avoid them, then you may need to reconsider where exactly you build your bunker.

3. Develop a Blueprint

Just like when you’re building a house, you first should develop a blueprint of your underground bunker. However, unlike a home, you’re not building for luxury, but rather for safety and security.

After you’ve picked where you want to build your bunker, measure the area you have to work with (away from the utility lines, trees and bodies of water). From there, you’ll get a sense of how you can design your blueprint.

There’s not going to be a lot of space, but that doesn’t mean you can’t make it work. You want to have enough room that you aren’t hugging your knees everywhere, but you don’t want to waste space.

Think of it as a small house and use the same tips to maximize space. For example:

1. Combine spaces by using an open area plan
2. Utilize vertical space for storage efficiency.
3. Install wall-mounted furniture like a desk or table to save on space.

Whatever you decide to do, make sure you plan for both efficiency and comfort. You may be building a bunker for safety, but that doesn’t mean you have to make it feel claustrophobic.

To avoid claustrophobia as much as possible while utilizing the limited amount of room that you have, FEMA recommends between 5-10 square feet per person for tornado or hurricane shelters. With this in mind, try to plan for that much private space per person.

4. Pick the Right Bunker Building Material

Make sure the bunker is made of a strong material that won’t crumble underneath the dirt. Not all building materials are equal, especially when it comes to dealing with building something underground. The most common building materials are:

1. Metal Sheeting – Metal sheeting is sturdy and water-resistant, but can also be expensive, especially since insulation would need to be added.
2. Bricks – Bricks, are sturdy and relatively affordable building materials that are also great insulators and incredibly weatherproof. They can also add style and color to an otherwise dreary situation.
3. Concrete – Reinforced concrete can withstand high loads and is relatively cheap. Self-healing concrete is an advanced building material that reduces maintenance requirements and has about a 200-year lifespan.

Don’t use wood, as it’s incredibly prone to weathering, rot and can become vulnerable to infestation. You can use wood to decorate the inside of your bunker, but make sure you keep it clean.

Shipping container bunkers can be spacious and cost-effective. However, you won’t be able to customize your layout as much. Shipping containers would also need to be reinforced as shipping containers aren’t built to be buried.

When you have your materials for your bunker ready, the next step is to figure out how to dig into the ground.

5. Choose the Right Excavating Equipment

Unless you have all the time in the world, a shovel isn’t sufficient enough for the task at hand. You need excavating equipment that can both dig quickly and in awkward or tight spaces. Since you’re aiming for accuracy and quickness of work when you’re digging, you’re going to want a trencher and an excavator.

There are five main uses for a trencher: cutting pavement, creating drainage, shoveling, digging for utility lines and cutting roots. When digging for your bunker, a trencher can help by outline the area where you want to place your bunker.

Excavators are versatile earthmoving machines that are used for anything from digging a trench to mining operations. Because there are different types of excavators available, you’ll be able to use one to dig out a hole for your bunker effectively.

You’ll start by measuring and setting up a perimeter for the dig. Then use the trencher to outline. After that, you can use an excavator to begin excavating the rest of the hole your bunker will be placed.

An excavator will provide a much more efficient and accurate dig due to their linear motion of digging. A mini excavator can fit in narrow spaces and are better suited for digging holes in awkward areas, such as a backyard.

6. Acquire Key Living Materials

Putting a metal box in the ground and calling it a day isn’t enough. An underground bunker needs to sustain you and your loved ones for an extended time. The five things you want to make sure that you include are:

1. Ventilation and Air Filters: These filter and ventilate clean air into your bunker. An N.B.C. (Nuclear, Biological, Chemical) filter is your best bet at protecting your shelter from air contaminants and providing fresh air.
2. Generator: This will provide electricity to your bunker. To determine how much power you will need, add up the total wattage of everything that uses electricity. This will give you an understanding of how to choose the best generator for your bunker. Consider installing a solar generator to avoid needing to stockpile fuel, or keep it around as a backup.
3. Water Filters: These will keep a reliable source of clean water on hand. Any water filter can work, but for an underground bunker, a UV filter is optimal. They use different frequencies of UV light to rid the water of viruses and bacteria.
4. Waste Removal System: Mismanaging waste can be detrimental to one’s health. For an underground bunker, there are a few options you can go with:
   • You can keep it simple with a room with a trench, like an outhouse. It’s cheap and quick, but it can be unsanitary.
   • A “poop tube” is a quick way to deal with waste, and they’re easy to make, needing only some PVC pipe. They’re not great for long-term use, however.
   • A composting toilet needs no water; instead, it transforms waste into fertilizer, which is excellent if you have plants, but they can be a little pricey and smelly in enclosed places.
   • A wastewater pump and lift system is a popular option for controlling waste. These systems pump waste from lower to higher elevations.

You’ll also want to stock up on bottled water, personal and non-perishable food. Don’t pinch pennies on any of these; they’re going to protect your shelter and all the inhabitants.

7. Start Digging

When you finally begin to dig, you’ll be utilizing the cut and cover method (similar to how subways are built). In this method, you dig a trench, create a support system (more on that later), place your bunker and cover it back up.

But before you break ground, let’s quickly review the digging safety once again. According to OSHA, digging is one of the most hazardous construction jobs, so make sure you’re practicing trenching safety by installing protective systems to prevent cave-ins. The three most common protective systems are sloping/benching, shoring and installing a trench shield.

1. Sloping involves cutting the trench wall at an angle to create a slope, where benching is the act of creating long benches/steps to travel up the wall.
2. Shoring is the act of building a support system to keep the dirt in place, preventing a collapse.
3. A trench shield, or trench box, protects the person inside from a cave in, rather than used to prevent one. Use this in conjunction with the other two protective systems.

Don’t forget to consider how deep your bunker is going to be. You want to dig deep enough to protect yourself from natural environments, but not too deep so that you risk trapping yourself.

A general rule of thumb is that the top of your bunker should have no more than 10 feet of packed dirt on top. Dry, packed dirt is warmer than loose soil and can protect against radiation and blast waves. However, if for some reason you need to dig yourself out, you won’t have a lot of dirt on top of you.

8. Reinforce the Shelter

Reinforcing your shelter is a crucial step in building an underground bunker. No matter how deep you dig, you’re going to have quite a bit of weight pressing down from the top due to soil, water, vegetation and other outside objects.

Begin by setting up a proper foundation before setting your shelter to support your bunker. Concrete is one of the best materials for a basic foundation but can be prone to cracking and breaking. Use reinforced concrete or self-healing concrete for greater results.

Place metal beams across the trench to support your bunker against collapsing. You can also use reinforced concrete to create an extra outer layer for added protection.

The walls of your bunker also need to be at least 1-3 feet thick. If you’re using metal sheets, make sure to add a layer of brick or concrete inside. If you’re using concrete, make sure that the walls are thick and reinforced to add extra protection against explosive shockwaves and radiation.

Water damage can create mold if untreated and destroy your structures. Coat your bunker and protective systems with waterproof materials, such as rubberized asphalt or cementitious waterproof coating.

If you’re building in an earthquake-prone area, consider utilizing similar reinforced methods as earthquake-proof buildings. Shear walls, cross braces and moment-resisting frames can redistribute the seismic forces, protecting the bunker.

9. Stock up on Provisions

Whether it’s a nuclear fallout or an apocalyptic scenario, you’re going to be spending some time beneath your bunker during the initial event. At the bare minimum, FEMA recommends you should have at least two weeks’ worth of food and water per person.

No matter what happens, you should apply the 7:10 rule of thumb that’s used to estimate radioactive risk. It states that for every 7-fold increase in time after detonation, there is a 10-fold increase in detonation.

Basically, if two hours have passed after detonation, the radiation exposure rate is 400 roentgens (radioactive waves) per hour. After 14 hours, the radioactive exposure rate is 1/10 of that.

Make sure the food is healthy and will last, however. A list of the healthiest, non-perishable foods include:

• Dried/canned beans
• Dried/canned fruits and veggies
• Dried/canned meats
• Peanut butter
• Nuts/seeds
• Grains
• Protein bars
• Canned soup
• Non-dairy and dry milk

Make sure you’re routinely restocking and replacing your foods; you don’t want to eat any spoiled food when an emergency happens.

You should also keep a microwave or other emergency cooking solution like canned heat or a portable butane stove. Candles can also be used as a form of slow cooking and are a trustworthy source of light in case the electricity goes out. Simply put a can or pot on a stove grate and place the candle below.

The water is especially important as radiation can continue to rain down for about 24 hours after detonation. You should also consider stocking up on vitamins and other supplements.

Likewise, your underground shelter doesn’t need to be a cold and gloomy place. It would be best if you did everything you can to prevent any psychological damage from isolation. Cabin fever is a popular term that refers to the negative feelings of isolation. It can cause:

• Restlessness
• Irritability
• Difficulty concentrating
• Lethargy
• Depression

Hang up pictures, install a speaker system to play music or add a workout area to keep yourself busy. Your mental health is just as important as your physical health, so make sure you take care of your mental well-being.

The COVID-19 pandemic has caused many to worry about their safety and well-being. Learning how to build an underground bunker can prepare you for any emergency. All you need now is the right equipment and a gameplan.

Related Posts

Swiss offer military bunkers as art storage answer

By Catherine Bosley, Myles Neligan

7 Min Read

ZURICH/LONDON (Reuters) – A metal door set into a mountain in Switzerland offers a way out for fine art investors forced to pay over the odds to insure their collections.

A view through an opened metal door shows the entrance into a 57-year old disused military bunker near the central Swiss town of Alpnach, near Lake Lucerne, August 27, 2012. The bunker, marketed as a site to store valuables and on offer at 386,000 Swiss francs ($417,000), could relieve a huge concentration of costly paintings at the world’s biggest fine art vault in Geneva, the storage option of choice for wealthy buyers worldwide. REUTERS/Arnd Wiegmann

The doorway leads into a disused military bunker, one of several being sold off by the Swiss government and whose echoing, climate-controlled chambers, once used to stockpile munitions, are being put forward as ideal storage space for works of art.

The 57-year-old bunker near Lake Lucerne, marketed as a site to store valuables and on offer at 386,000 Swiss francs ($417,000), could relieve a huge concentration of costly paintings at the world’s biggest fine art vault in Geneva, the storage option of choice for wealthy buyers worldwide.

That warehouse, prized for its high security and its location in Geneva’s tax-exempt freeport zone, holds art worth about $100 billion and has space to accommodate more.

But insurance underwriters, fearing ruinous losses if the facility were hit by a fire or an art heist of the kind that struck Rotterdam’s Kunsthal museum earlier this month, are raising the cost of insuring any more paintings under its roof, or even refusing cover altogether.

“If you are a prudent insurer you want to make certain that you know how much risk you are exposed to at a certain location,” said Nick Brett, underwriting director at AXA Art Insurance, the world’s biggest specialist art insurer.

“There’s an awful lot of art in Geneva freeport, and as insurers we have to make sure we don’t expose ourselves to just one place.”

The cost of insuring paintings stored at the Geneva facility has doubled over the last three years, Brett estimates. Investors who stockpile art in an equally secure location without the same concentration of risk can expect to pay up to 50 percent less to insure it, according to Richard Nicholson, fine art specialist at insurance broker Willis.

The insurance impasse at Geneva, replicated at other specialist art vaults worldwide, comes as wealthy investors fleeing volatile stock and bond markets are putting money into paintings instead and need places to store them.

Soaring art sales have increased the volume of work in storage while also boosting its price, causing a build-up of value at the world’s art vaults, and creating an unforeseen new risk factor for the insurance industry.

Art investors want new storage space to cut their insurance costs, and would use converted military bunkers provided they met the necessary security and climate control requirements, said Enrique Liberman, president of the New York-based Art Fund Association.

“It really depends what they do with the space rather than the space itself,” he said. “If you expand the number of warehouses a lot of the risks inherent to storing art might be mitigated, because they won’t be so overcrowded.”

Slideshow ( 3 images )

BURNING QUESTION

The danger of allowing a big accumulation of costly art in one place was underscored in 2004 by a London warehouse fire which destroyed work by Damien Hirst and Tracey Emin among others, costing insurers 20 million pounds ($30 million).

With turmoil in financial markets prolonging the art investment boom, art storage looks set to remain at a premium.

Art’s growing appeal as an investment asset is illustrated by the emergence since the mid-2000s of professional fine art investment funds. There are about 45 such funds with combined assets of about $1 billion, and more are preparing to launch, according to the Art Fund Association’s Liberman.

They have contributed to the global art market’s recovery from a brief downturn after the 2008 banking crash, evidenced by the sale in May of a version of Munch’s “The Scream” for a record $120 million.

Total sales through auction houses and dealers grew to an estimated $55 billion last year, not far off their pre-crisis peak of about $60 billion, Willis’ Nicholson said.

Art storage firms have responded by building new facilities. The Geneva freeport unit is being extended, and a new freeport vault is due to open its doors in Luxembourg in 2014.

But disused bunkers in Switzerland, the epicentre of the art storage world thanks to the country’s expertise in discreetly looking after the assets of the rich, offer a ready-made alternative that is already being exploited.

“People have been talking about this for some time,” said Robert Read, fine art underwriter at Bermuda-based Hiscox, the world’s second-biggest art insurer.

“It would make very suitable storage.”

One firm that has successfully converted a military facility into storage space for art is Swiss Data Safe, based in the central Swiss town of Amsteg. Swiss Data Safe stockpiles paintings, bullion and computer data in an Alpine bunker originally intended as a refuge for the Swiss government in case of invasion or nuclear war.

The company declined to be interviewed.

The Tate, home to Britain’s national art collection, keeps some of its paintings in a decommissioned missile storage unit in Hampshire, south-west of London, an art industry source said. The Tate declined to comment.

Missile bunkers can be adapted to hold paintings as they are climate-controlled and highly secure, the main requirements for art storage, according Paul Williamson, commercial director at London-based art logistics firm Constantine.

Buying and converting a bunker could also be cheaper than building a vault from scratch, which can cost between 15 million and 20 million pounds ($24-$32 million), Williamson said.

BUNKERS FOR SALE

There are many disused military facilities in Switzerland, heavily fortified during World War II against Nazi invasion.

More were built at the height of the cold war in the 1960s, when the country was committed to providing space in a nuclear fallout shelter for each resident.

But the collapse of the Soviet Union has led to a reassessment of defence priorities. To save money, many such sites were closed, and some are now up for sale.

Armasuisse, the government agency selling the bunker near lake Lucerne, declined to say how much interest it has received. The agency will review offers for the site after October 31.

Art insurance premiums amount to about $600 million annually. Big art claims have been rare, caused mainly by accidental damage to paintings during transport, or mishaps such as a 2006 incident in which casino owner Steve Wynn put his elbow through a Picasso he owned.

But the build-up of billions of dollars’ worth of art in a handful of locations has brought a realisation that a single event could now easily wipe out a whole year’s premiums.

“A plane crashing into one of the freeports – that would be where our catastrophes are,” said Hiscox’s Robert Read.

Reporting by Myles Neligan in London and Catherine Bosley in Zurich; Editing by Giles Elgood

Shipping Container Bunkers and Emergency Shelters

The world is full of risk and danger to our normal way of life, from extreme weather events to acts of terrorism. For many people, having a durable space to store supplies and retreat into when required is a necessity. And shipping containers are a great way to build such a structure.

In this article, we’ll discuss everything you’ve ever wanted to know about shipping container disaster shelters and other types of resilient container uses. Make sure you make it all the way down to the bottom of the article to see the examples of shipping container emergency shelters.

Understanding Disaster Preparedness

No discussion of shipping container disaster shelters and similar structures is complete without understanding why you would want to build one in the first place. Understand that there are entire books and websites exclusively devoted to this topic, so our discussion below is simply an overview to ultimately help understand how shipping containers can play a role in this situation.

The Preparedness Mindset

Being prepared for an emergency is a thought process acquired over time. Some people obsess over it while others consider it a small but important part of their normal life. People who were once unconcerned with it may suddenly be awakened when they or someone they know was put in a situation that required prior preparations and some level of self-reliance.

You can’t just close your eyes and hope for the best unless you want to be a victim. Preparation is key!

The more extreme end of the self-sufficiency movement spectrum is captured by things like the Doomsday Preppers TV Show, who in many cases are concerned about the full collapse of society. “Preppers” are often pictured as those who take preparedness to an extreme and go to often great lengths to ensure their personal safety and survival in the worst possible situations they can imagine.

On the other end of the spectrum are people who simply want to avoid being victims in the somewhat rare but certainly possible circumstances that can come our way. Almost everyone has some level of preparedness, after all, unless you eat every meal in restaurants and drive your car around with no spare tire and an empty fuel tank!

In the middle are average people who because of personal history, research, or other reasons, have become interested in hardening their own defenses against outside threats. People who have spent time in the military, those who are avid hikers and outdoor recreation lovers, or previous members of organizations like the Boy Scouts and Girl Scouts, often have a greater appreciation for being prepared.

One group that takes the subject very seriously are Mormons (members of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints), who strongly emphasize emergency preparedness and food storage. There are also a surprising amount of very wealthy and high intelligent people preparing for emergencies as well.  

There are certainly fringe groups that exist in the world of home defense, survivalism, and emergency preparedness. However, there are plenty of regular people out there too that take being prepared seriously without being paranoid. We hope that wherever you currently fall, you’ll continue reading with an open mind!

Understand that most disasters don’t care about your skin color, political affiliation, or age…preparation is universally a good idea for all people. There are numerous real and possible emergencies, and odds are high that you’ll go through at least one in your life if not more.

External Risks and Threats to Mitigate

The idea of preparing for and surviving both man-made and natural disasters is based on the assumption that one might occur. Below are examples of the types of disaster events that emergency minded and survivalist people are worried about:

• Tornado and Typhoons: Extreme winds not only make it difficult to leave your house, but they also threaten your safety inside our house unless it is built especially strong.
• Hurricanes, Floods, and Tsunamis: Water coming from the sea or sky can quickly displace you from your house and force you into a survival scenario.
• Earthquakes and Landslides: These forceful natural events can damage communication lines, roads, and inadequately built structures.
• Snow and Ice Storms: In addition to the deadly cold temperatures, these weather events can also seriously impede your ability to travel in search of supplies.
• Fire: Forest and grassfires can sweep over terrain quickly destroying anything flammable in their path. Traditional homes barely stand a chance.
• Meteor Impact and Volcanoes: These rare events can cause immediate damage then continue the suffering for days as their dust and ash block the sun and make the air unbreathable.
• Nuclear, Biological, Chemical or other Terrorist Attack: Hostile actors can wreak havoc that damages public infrastructure, poisons the water supply, spreads illness, and more.
• Disease Pandemic/Epidemic: A disease that’s naturally occurring is no less dangerous as the Corona Virus of 2020, the Spanish Flu of 1918, and the Black Death of the 1300s prove.
• Economic Depression and Political Unrest: Economies and societies can actually be quite fragile. Disruption due to public policy, natural events, war, etc. can quickly erode supply chains and the normal ability to purchase things at a moment’s notice.
• Personal Unemployment: Even with no external issues from society, the loss of your own job can cause tremendous financial stress and is worthy of preparation as well.
• Crime: Things like local gangs, escaped prisoners, or other temporary spikes in criminal activity can make even leaving your home a dangerous event.

Disaster Shelter Requirements

Understanding that the risks described above are real, having a specialized structure to handle the requirements of possible emergencies is where we’ll focus next.  

There are various names for what we’re talking about here:

1. Bunkers: Emergency bunker, bugout bunker, doomsday bunker, etc.
2. Shelters: Disaster shelter, storm shelter, bomb shelter, tornado shelter, etc.
3. Rooms: Panic room, safe room, prepper room, etc.

At a high level, they are all more or less trying to do the same thing, which is to protect you from external threats and provide for your welfare while you’re inside. Obviously, each variant does so from a slightly different angle.

How well an individual solution will protect you depends on which threats you think are most probable: if you live on a Caribbean beach, snowstorms aren’t a concern but hurricanes and tsunamis should be.

Your survival bunker requirements are driven not just by what’s happening outside, but by what you need to accommodate and accomplish inside.

Below are a few things to consider across several categories:F

Timeline

The first thing to consider is, based on the risk of different disasters and emergencies in the area where you reside, how long do you want to prepare to live in your shelter? Every location is different and each person has a different amount of risk they are willing to tolerate (you can’t prepare for every possible unknown…that’s why it’s an unknown).

People often create plans to shelter-in-place for up to three days, up to two weeks, up to three months, etc. Where you make that cut off will determine not just how much stuff you need, but what stuff you need too. 

Note that the Red Cross recommends planning for three days if an evacuation happens or two weeks if you shelter in place at home. Many choose to exceed these minimum recommendations.

Occupants

When it comes to actual human occupants, you need to take into consideration both quantitative and qualitative requirements. From a quantity standpoint, think about how many total people you have to feed, clothe, care for, and provide a place to sleep. 

Additionally, occupant ages and capabilities are a huge factor, as it dictates both their own personal needs and their ability to contribute to the group. Finally, you have to think of things like disabilities, dietary restrictions, allergies, etc. that might require specialized supplies or accommodations.

Another consideration is pets if you have them. Pets obviously require a whole other type of planning and provisioning, depending on species.

Supplies

The people that will be inside the shelter obviously need supplies to sustain them. Below are a few examples:

• Food: You need sustenance that can last for months or even years (unless you want to continually be replacing it), that tastes decent enough to eat for weeks on end, and that provides enough calories and nutrients to keep you healthy (or also take vitamins and supplements to make up the difference).
• Clothing and Bedding: Appropriate clothes as well as sheets and blankets to keep everyone comfortable.
• Drinking-Water: If municipal water and well water is temporarily unavailable, you’ll need a supply of water to drink and cook with.
• Financial Reserves: In many of the situations above, you may need to acquire additional resources but your access to things like banks and ATMs may be limited. Having cash on hand or even additional emergency supplies to use for bartering may be useful.
• Medication and First Aid Supplies: You’ll need to be able to deal with any pre-existing conditions that occupants have upon entry to your shelter, as well as any emerging issues that appear due to illness or injury. You may also want extra if you encounter friends and neighbors that require aid.
• Sanitation and Waste Management Materials: Just like the famous book that says “Everyone Poops”, you’ll need a way to deal with human waste, food waste, greywater, etc.
• Fuel Sources: Depending on what equipment you have for climate regulation, cooking, lighting, electrical generation, etc. you’ll need some type of fuel source in case grid-provided power systems fail.

Equipment

If you could simply live in a dark cave, eat your food, and sleep until the threat is gone, you might be ok without much equipment. But in most cases, you’ll need some additional tools, gear, and prepper supplies to make your bugout shelter more habitable and comfortable. Below are a few examples:

• Communications Gear: Backup cell phones and computers are good, but in case that infrastructure doesn’t function, radios are also incredibly useful.
• Air Filtration System: Humans can go days or even weeks without food and water, but only minutes without breathable air if an emergency affects the atmosphere.
• Water Filtration System: Stored water is good, but it takes up a ton of room. For longer durations, you have to think about being able to filter water as well.
• Power Production Equipment: If you don’t go with fuel-based equipment, you have options like wind turbines, solar panels, and batteries to power your equipment.
• Cooking, Heating, and Cooling Equipment: Temperature regulation and indoor meal preparation both require specific equipment.
• Furnishings: Unless you’re staying for less than an hour, you’ll want to think about sitting and even sleeping spaces. Folding chairs and bunk beds are great ways to maximize space.
• Illumination: When indoors, it’s crucial that you have both permanent and portable illumination devices to see for daily activities.
• Physical Safety And Hunting Tools: A gun, knife, bow or other devices can be useful for both protecting occupants and acquiring additional food.
• Alternate Transportation: Maybe it’s a bicycle, maybe it’s skis, but it’s worth considering having a different means of transit available in case your primary vehicle is not available or operational.

Informational Resources

In many cases, information can be just as valuable as tangible goods. The ability to know where to go and who to call for help cannot be discounted, and your emergency plan should include locating, storing, and updating important data sources.

• Important Documents: Think of things like passports, bank account numbers, property deeds, etc.
• Annotated Paper Maps: If Google Maps isn’t working, you still need to know where to go. Paper maps should be marked with important locations like friend/family homes, water sources, emergency services, etc.
• Contact Information: It’s a good idea to have multiple means of contact for family and friends, local emergency services, the Red Cross, other public service organizations, etc.

Optional Uses

Despite planning for worst-case scenarios, odds are high you won’t use your emergency bunker often for emergencies. So, it’s prudent to think about appropriate secondary-uses for the space.

Examples include wine storage, guest rooms, exercise spaces, etc. Our She-Shed and Man-Cave article gives numerous other examples of small structures to give you some inspiration.

Whatever you decide on, ensure that your survival shelter can be quickly reconfigured back to its primary purpose: ensuring your safety. This means you can’t let it get full of clutter, etc. that would delay you in a time-critical emergency.

Benefits of Shipping Container Bunkers and Disaster Shelters

We’ve thoroughly covered why you need a security bunker and what it needs to be able to do. Now, let’s discuss some of the positive attributes of shipping containers that make them well-suited for these types of roles:

• Secure: The walls and roof of a container are made from solid steel. Even Chuck Norris couldn’t kick through one! And when appropriately locked and secured, gaining unwanted entry is a difficult and timely process.
• Durable: Containers are made to endure treacherous voyages at sea while filled with tens of thousands of pounds of products…and hundreds of thousands of pounds of filled containers stacked on top. Even unmodified, they are still much stronger than most types of traditional construction.
• Affordable: Empty containers can be purchased for just a few thousand dollars, with a little bit more to add a foundation to secure it to the ground.
• Easy to Find: Steel shipping containers are commoditized, so they are easy to find. In most parts of the world, you can get one in just a few days. There’s no waiting on a factory to build one for you or on contractors to custom-make one at your house like other shelter types.
• Airtight: Containers are so airtight that they have more condensation issues than most traditionally constructed buildings (though this is easily dealt with). If the threat of an airborne virus or biological/chemical attack is part of your concern, the last thing you want is a traditional building with air leaks.

Downsides of Shipping Container Bunkers and Disaster Shelters

Depending on the threats you want to mitigate, a container survival shelter may be the wrong choice. Below are some of the negatives of using containers. Understand that finding a structure-type without any of these negatives will be very costly, but we’ll discuss some other choices in the next section.

• External Door Locks: Container doors lock externally, which means that someone needs to  shut them, then somehow still get into the container afterward. A secondary door or roof hatch can be used for this (see below). Or, you can remove the external locking mechanism from the container doors and attach an internal door bar that you can set from inside.
• Good Foundation Required: Containers may be strong and heavy, but high winds, moving water, or shifting ground can still move them as these people can attest. They need to be rigidly attached to the ground to keep them securely in place.
• Single Set of Doors: Many preppers recommend having multiple ingress/egress options in case the first door(s) is blocked by debris, etc. However, it’s easy enough to add a secondary door or roof hatch to a shipping container if you like.
• Not Very Resilient to Gunfire or Heavy Flying Debris: As discussed in our Container Dimensions article, the corrugated metal skin of a container is typically around 1. 5 – 2mm thick. When it comes to bullets, a container can stop a .22lr but usually not larger caliber ammunition. And high-speed debris in a tornado or hurricane situation can definitely leave a dent in a container (and something sharper might pierce it).
• Not Good for Underground Shelter Use: Building underground certainly affords you more protection from many threats (though it does introduce others like flooding and radon gas), but doing it with a container is another thing entirely. We’ve said it before: containers should NOT be used underground without extensive structural modifications. If you want a buried structure, you’re usually better of going with something tailor-made for that purpose (see below).

Other Emergency Shelter Options

The world of survival bunkers, safe rooms, and fallout shelters includes quite a wide variety of construction types and acquisition possibilities. So before we showcase shipping containers shelter examples, let’s first cover a few other options for comparison.

Common construction methods include concrete and steel, whether freestanding or subterranean. Here are some examples:

Missile Silos, Telecommunication Bunkers, and Military Facilities

The United States Government constructed hundreds of underground missile silos throughout the country during the Cold War, housing Atlas E, Atlas F, Titan I, Titan II and Minuteman missiles. Most are now unused and in private ownership. Built for millions of dollars each, these buildings are extremely secure.

There are also countless above and below ground buildings built for telecommunication purposes. They formerly housed equipment for underground cables or radio towers and were built securely to ensure that communications could continue regardless of weather conditions. These too can be found for much less than their cost of construction.

In the US, companies like 20th Century Castles and Survival Realty can help you locate such properties.

But, these types of structures aren’t just in the United States. For instance, did you know that Albania has over 173,000 concrete bunkers? There may be similar types of hardened structures located near where you live as well.

Shared Ownership Shelters

If you like the idea of having access to a secure shelter, but don’t have the resources or land to have one at your current home, there are other options. Several companies now sell memberships and partial ownerships of larger, shared facilities. Some of them make use of previous military buildings like those discussed above, while others are purpose-built.

Vivos is repurposing the hundreds of ordnance storage bunkers at the former Black Hills Ordnance Depot into secure bunkers for sale. These buildings are above-ground but are earth-sheltered, meaning dirt is piled beside and on top of them for additional protection.

Or, there are facilities that were constructed with survival scenarios in mind, like the Fortitude Ranch. Another option is leasing space in an existing, privately owned bunker through the Bunker Network.

Repurposed Caves, Mines, and Quarries

These existing subterranean spaces make great places to store supplies and survive emergency situations. Included in the category are natural caverns and man-made excavations created in search of minerals.

Some, like the Beckham Creek Cave above, have been turned into huge, luxury accommodations. It can be rented by the night and is basically an entire home inside a security bunker.

Others are huge complexes that are used for commercial purposes. At one time, such as during the Cuban Missile Crisis, some of these larger facilities were also planned for survival bunkers and national stockpiles as well. Numerous examples exist all over the world. In the US, a few examples include the SubTropolis, the Louisville MegaSpace, the Bussen Underground Warehouse, the Atchison Storage Facility, and the Marengo Warehouse.

Personal Shelters

If you want a personal shelter, on your property, just for you and your immediate family, you have a number of options. Dozens if not hundreds of companies exist to provide everything from closet-size safe rooms that you can place inside your house to family-sized underground rooms. There are even options you place beneath your garage!

These safe spaces can be made of precast concrete, poured-in-place concrete, structural steel, or even corrugated steel culverts. The options are really only limited by your budget and imagination. Several of the major players in this space include Atlas Survival Shelters, Rising S Bunkers, and Ground Zero Shelters.

Shipping Container Bunker Examples

There are a variety of ways that steel shipping container shelters can be built. Some are just bare-bones structures intended only to keep threats out and nothing else. Others have had a lot of effort placed into making them pleasurable spaces to occupy. The below examples demonstrate how flexible containers are for purposes of building a safe space.

Stormbox

Stormbox creates aboveground storm shelters from specially modified shipping containers. They are engineered and tested for survivability from F5 Tornadoes and Category 5 hurricanes thanks to their internal reinforcement and strong anchors to a thick concrete slab.

Henson Construction Safe Zones

Henson Construction builds what they call Safe Zones, which are multipurpose shelters built from shipping containers. However, the interior and exterior surfaces of the container are covered so that there is almost no indication that a container is underneath. Yet, the strength and resiliency of containers is at the core of these buildings.

The safe zone shown in the above photo was created to be a University of Tennessee themed man-cave, complete with wet bar, pool table, and multiple TV screens. Yet, the room is also extremely secure and goes to show that safe rooms don’t have to be boring.

Safety Bunkers

Safety Bunkers creates a variety of both aboveground and belowground storm shelters. They do use shipping containers for some of their products, both others are custom designed out of metal.

The above example demonstrates how they provide both horizontal and vertical structural enhancements to the exterior of their container bunkers. Additionally, there are also interior reinforcements as well. Together, these additional supports transform a regular shipping container into a building that can endure greater stress from extreme weather and other events.

Friend School Storm Shelter

The Friend School in Chickasha, Oklahoma is right in the middle of an area of the US with high tornado activity. Worried about their normal plan of busing students to a nearby church basement in case of severe storms, the school looked for an economical storm shelter alternative.

With the help of a local architect and community donations, they built the Mark Henderson shelter out of four 40ft shipping containers. The containers were modified and then earth-bermed to provide additional protection from the tornados that frequent the area.

Summary

This article certainly wasn’t meant to scare or worry anyone. Rather, it is meant to highlight a growing trend of people who are concerned about their safety and wellbeing and are choosing to be proactive.

Life is all about choices, risks, and knowing what you can control. For some, making the types of preparations discussed in the article may seem too extreme. For others, it’s impossible to be too careful.

Regardless of where you draw your own boundaries for personal security and safety, we’ve now shown a light on the types of risks and emergencies that are potentially out there for you. We also hope that you now have a general understanding of the types of preparations and shelter options that are available to you.

Whether a shipping container should be the basis of your own emergency room is a personal choice that depends on a variety of factors like your resources, alternatives, and most probable risks. But armed with the information in this article, you can make a much more informed decision about the safety of you, your family, and your neighbors.

Do you know of another shipping container shelter that we’ve overlooked? What do you think about managing risks and the cost to do so? Let us know in the comment below.

From Bunkers to Businesses by Valerie Hopkins (Works That Work magazine)

Works That Work, No.3,

by Valerie Hopkins

(2405 words)

Between 1973 and 1982 Albanian dictator Enver Hoxha built hundreds of thousands of concrete bunkers intended to shelter his people in the event of an invasion. Thirty years after his death the bunkers still wait on the hilltops, along the beaches, in the fields and scattered throughout the cities of Albania. Some of them are being put to new uses.

Cover photo: Empty painted bunkers near the seaside village of Qeparo on the Albanian Riviera. (Photo: David Galjaard)

Enver Hoxha (1908–1985), the isolationist dictator who ruled Albania from 1944 until his death in 1985, was convinced that his country faced imminent invasion from its neighbours, from NATO or from the USSR. For Haki Isufi, this meant that from the age of 12 he underwent an hour of military training every day at school. By the time he was 14 he had already been given a Kalashnikov and been told to practise firing it from the embrasure of an eight-ton, steel-reinforced concrete bunker—easy to do, since there were two in his yard.

(Photo: David Galjaard)

These two-person shelters belonged to an estimated 750,000 bunkers built by Hoxha’s regime. Construction began in 1967 and escalated dramatically in the late 1960s after the invasion of Czechoslovakia by the Warsaw Pact countries that had once been Albania’s allies. The ubiquity of the bunkers meant that Isufi could defend against invaders from wherever he happened to be when disaster struck, from his school, backyard, or workplace. ‘It made me feel very safe at the time,’ he says.

No one knows exactly how many of these concrete pillboxes were constructed, but estimates range from 500,000 to 1,000,000. Most of them are small qendër zjarri, bunkers like Isufi’s. They stand 2.1m (6.9ft) high and consist of a cylindrical base 1.8m (5.9ft) in diameter with a domed roof featuring a narrow, horizontal embrasure. Their 0.3m (11.8in) walls are further reinforced on the front-facing side by a semicircular outer wall and 0.6m (23.6in) of packed dirt. There are also larger pikë zjarri bunkers, concrete domes 8m (26.2ft) wide and 5m (16.4ft) high, designed to protect up to ten occupants, whose 1m (3.3ft) walls were capable of defying continuous, close-range artillery fire. The general consensus, based on sparse military records, personal recollections and contemporary research, is that there were 24 to 27 qendër zjarri bunkers and one pikë zjarri bunker per square kilometre (0.4 mi.²), an expensive insurance policy against the foreign ‘imperialism and revisionism’ Hoxha feared. The bunkers dotted urban centres and bucolic hilltops, playgrounds and cemeteries, and of course schools and apartment complexes.

The austere concrete structures represented Albania’s tradition of tough self-reliance: in the Second World War, it was the only country to liberate itself without direct foreign assistance.

Petrol station on the outskirts of Tirana. The bunker was painted to look like an orange by the prolific German graffiti artist Daniel Gjoka (aka ‘Orange’). (Photo: David Galjaard)

Ironically, although they were built to withstand intense bombardment in a ground invasion that never came, they are succumbing to the peacetime forces of economics, public safety and abhorrence of the past. Isufi says he sold the steel from one of his bunkers, which took a whole weekend to destroy, for €300 (US$400), more than the €260 (US$350) average monthly salary of an Albanian. Still, he kept the other bunker in his backyard as a house for his guard dog, and across the country others like him have repurposed them as chicken coops, hay storage, workshops and more, converting these relics of isolationism into a functional manifestation of the country’s embrace of capitalism.

In Golem, Kujtim Roci turned a beachside bunker into the core of a restaurant and hotel complex. In 1991, as communism collapsed, he left his job as a plumber and began distilling raki, Albania’s national alcoholic beverage, in a pikë zjarri near his home. He requested permission from the Ministry of Defence to convert the bunker into a restaurant, the Elesio Grill, named for his son.

The bunker first served as a café and bar, with tables inside and outside. Now, Roci has built three storeys over the bunker, which continues to function as a wine cellar and storage area since its temperature remains consistently cool year-round. The top of its dome protrudes into the centre of the first-floor dining room, and Roci took a break from frying fish to show it off.

‘Tourists from all over Europe come to see this bunker,’ says Roci. ‘It has given me a good living.’

A number of bigger beachside bunkers serve as restaurants and cafés, but it’s more common to find them used to house toilets, changing rooms and storage for small enterprises that rent beach umbrellas and chaises longues to tourists.

A two-person bunker nestles among the graves in this cemetery between Tirana and Mount Dajt in Central Albania. (Photo: David Galjaard)

A few kilometres down the coast, Fatmir Kadziju is serving soft drinks to a group of high schoolers from neighbouring Kosovo. The concrete shape of his bunker/refreshment stand looms over their volleyball game, providing some shade. Unfortunately, he says, not all of his neighbours wanted to save these hulking vestiges of totalitarianism.

‘Seven bunkers just like this one were destroyed in this area,’ says Kadziju. ‘That is a real shame; we need to keep these for history.’

In Hoxha’s birthplace Gjirokastër, one of two ‘historical cities’ the dictator sought to preserve in their pre-First World War Ottoman style, a bunker at the base of a cliff has been converted into Pub Elnis, complete with black pleather sofas and the requisite dim lighting.

A younger generation sees them as a boon for boosting tourism. Conceptual design artists Elian Stefa and Gyler Mydyti have created Concrete Mushrooms, an open-source manual for re-purposing bunkers into businesses that was launched at the 2012 Venice Biennale.

‘Bunkers are an essential part of Albanian identity,’ says Stefa, who was born in the resort town of Vlore, and played in its beachside bunkers as a child before moving to Italy after the Albanian economy collapsed in the mid-nineties. ‘They represent 45 years of communism that changed this country in so many ways. They might be a scar, but a scar is just a good story to tell.’ He worries that the country is not undertaking a comprehensive plan to preserve at least some bunkers, and suggests that some areas preserve the original area density of bunkers for posterity.

All of the bunkers are technically property of the Albanian Ministry of Defence, and technically businesspeople must apply for ownership, but in the freewheeling 1990s, monitoring bunker use—or enforcing laws against their destruction—was not a top government priority.

Father and son on the road between the city of Fier and Seman beach, demolishing a bunker to sell its iron. ‘When I passed by a week later, they were still working’, says photographer David Galjaard. The smaller bunkers contain about 400kg of iron that can be sold on the market for €0.15/kg (US$0.09/lb.) or about €60 (US$81.30) per bunker. Destroying bunkers is illegal but tolerated by authorities as long as explosives aren’t used. (Photo: David Galjaard)

Stefa and Mydyti, an ethnic Albanian from Prizren, Kosovo, say their goal is to convert a symbol of burdensome xenophobia into a resource for hospitality, while promoting sustainable eco-tourism. Their bilingual handbook provides detailed instructions for converting bunkers into campsites, kiosks or cafés depending on their size and location and then provides guidance on working with the local authorities to realise the plan.

One suggested alteration would turn a bunker into a sleeping pod with an investment of just €150 (US$200). The pair also provide blueprints for the transformation of entire stretches of beach. They have even identified a number of potentially lucrative, bunker-rich sites, based on location, proximity to tourist attractions, beaches and hiking trails.

Stefa is part of a generation of Albanians educated abroad who are just now returning to a changed Tirana—and who don’t see the bunkers as negative. ‘For me as a child it was just a bunker,’ he says. ‘It was like any other big rock. Why would I be curious about what a rock was doing in a given place?’ He only grew interested when hosting non-Albanian friends who were awed by the bunkers’ novelty. He is among a group of young urbanites striving to save the bunkers, not only as an object of memory, but to foster a nuanced sense of humour about the tortured past.

Though Albanians are divided on the question of whether such a potent symbol of totalitarianism can be converted into something good, at least some among the trendsetting post-Hoxha generation want to celebrate the bunkers—literally.

Zhujeta Cima founded Bunkerfest in 2010 to ‘spread the love’ for bunkers and turn a spotlight on them for a weekend of camping, music and fun. Bunkerfest 2011 and 2012 featured dance parties inside actual bunkers, but those bunkers were destroyed, so Bunkerfest 2013 was held amidst the bunkers on Dajti Mountain, 26km (16. 2 mi.) east of Tirana, drawing bands, DJs and festivalgoers even from former Yugoslavia, one of Hoxha’s chief enemies.

‘The bunkers were built for military protection; they were supposed to be used for making war,’ says Cima, smiling as she remembers that she and many of her friends had their first kisses in bunkers. ‘Now we are trying to use them to spread love through art. Instead of destroying them or leaving them behind to disappear, why not convert the shabby side of the story into something positive?’

Hundreds of thousands of concrete bunkers dot the Albanian countryside and adorn its city streets. Never used for civil defence, today they are being repurposed in surprising ways.

While the majority of the bunkers continue to stand empty, some have been repurposed. This one at picturesque Seman beach is now a fast-food restaurant. Other bunkers have been creatively converted into cafés, kiosks, ice cream stands, mushroom and flower farms, hostels and beach huts. (Photo: David Galjaard)

Bunkers served as both inspiration and material for artist Niku Alex Mucaj’s ‘Converscene’, a permanent, functional open-air stage he built on three inverted qendër zjarri roofs as part of his postgraduate work in post-industrial design. Turning the bunkers upside down, says Mucaj, is a physical symbol of transformation, one that he says his society must go through as well. ‘I wanted to transform the bunkers, one of the most prevalent symbols of isolation, into something that would play a role in Albania’s slow process of democratisation, something that would function like a Greek agora.’

Mucaj added a small detail to his stage that symbolises Albania’s as yet unresolved post-bunker future: four slim pieces of rebar installed in each corner of the stage. He explains that it looks familiar to anyone who has driven around Albania and seen that many homes remain unfinished, with rebar poking out of the top. ‘When they build homes, lots of Albanians make space for a third and fourth floor, a plan for when their children have families of their own,’ he explains. ‘The beams here represent my hope for the country’s future, its continued (re)construction, just as a family plans for extra space.’

(Photo: David Galjaard)

Along the country’s northern border with the former Yugoslav country of Montenegro, tattoo artist Keq Marku Djetroshan uses a pikë zjarri as his tattoo parlour. (Photo: David Galjaard)

At present it is impossible to say how many of these relics of the former regime will find new uses and how many will be destroyed. Isufi says that his remaining bunker will remain for as long as he lives in his home. He is content that his dog can sleep inside it and guard his property from its roof during the day.

‘You never know what could happen,’ he says. ‘I’ve seen a lot of changes in my lifetime.’

Valerie Hopkins is a Pristina-based freelance journalist who reports on Eastern Europe and the Western Balkans. Dutch photographer David Galjaard explored Albania’s bunkers as a reflection of a country transitioning from its isolationist past.

The bunker builders preparing for doomsday

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Engineering

The bunker builders preparing for doomsday

(Image credit: Getty Images)

By Bradley Garrett14th May 2020

For some, the current crisis is a dummy run for long-term lockdown. Across the world, luxury bunkers are being built for a lucky few to survive calamity and collapse.

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Nestled among Kansas cornfields in a landscape devoid of any noticeable natural topography, a verdant mound can be seen from a dirt road. Surrounded by a military-grade chain fence and in the shadow of a large wind turbine, a security guard in camouflage paces the fence line with an assault rifle. If you look closely, you might notice what looks like a concrete pill box perched on the top of the small hill, flanked by cameras. What lies underneath is a bunker that is unassuming, unassailable and – to many – unbelievable.

To the outsider it looks a bit like a secret government installation – and indeed at one time it was. But this is not a bunker built to hide citizens or to protect the politicians who ordered its construction. It is an Atlas F missile silo, built by the US in the early 1960s at a cost of about $15m (£12.2m). It was one of 72 blast “hardened” silo structures built to protect nuclear-tipped Intercontinental Ballistic Missiles (IBMs) with an ordnance 100 times more powerful than the bomb dropped on Nagasaki. Although it was out of sight and out of mind to the average US citizen, it played a crucial role in a geopolitical agenda of extinction-level significance during the Cold War.

However, that was then. The bunker is now no longer owned by the government, but by Larry Hall, a former government contractor, property developer and self-confessed doomsday “prepper” who purchased it in 2008. Preppers are the people who anticipate and attempt to adapt for what they see as probable or inevitable and impending conditions of calamity (ranging from low-level crises to extinction-level events). According to Michael Mills, a criminologist at the University of Kent, preppers build for situations where “food and basic utilities may be unavailable, government assistance may be non-existent and survivors may have to individually sustain their own survival”.

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Since purchasing the silo over a decade ago, Hall has transformed this subterranean megastructure into a 15-story inverted tower block – a “geoscraper” – now dubbed Survival Condo. It is designed for a community of up to 75 people to weather a maximum of five years inside a sealed, self-sufficient luxury habitat. When the event passes, residents expect to be able emerge into the post-apocalyptic world (Paw, in prepper parlance) to rebuild society afresh. 

I spent three years conducting ethnographic research with nearly 100 preppers from six countries, including Australia, the UK, Germany, Thailand, Korea and the US. I’ve hung out in bunker complexes on the Great Plains, with groups growing food in secret forests, with people building heavily armoured vehicles, and with religious communities that have collected supplies that they’re ready to hand over to strangers in need. According to these preppers, the ongoing Covid-19 pandemic is merely a “mid-level” event – a warm up for what is to come. They anticipated and prepared for a disaster just like this one, and – unlike most of us – say they weren’t caught by surprise. 

Larry Hall says the bunker complex is an “experiment in architecture” (Credit: Bradley Garrett)

Most preppers are not in fact preparing for doomsday – they’re everyday people who anticipate and try to adapt for many conditions of calamity; conditions that they believe are inevitable and have been exponentially escalated through human hubris and excessive reliance on technology and global trade networks. While the disasters they anticipate might – at the more extreme end of the spectrum – include major “resets” like an all-out nuclear war or a massive electromagnetic pulse from the Sun that would fry our fragile electronics, most preppers stockpile for low to mid-level crises like the one the world is experiencing now.  

Indeed, a new banner on Survival Condo’s website boasts that the silo’s nuclear, biological and chemical air filters can “screen out” the Covid-19 virus. While most of us wouldn’t build against crisis to this degree, or even get the opportunity to, there are still some lessons I discovered that society can learn from preppers and the way they look at the world.

A brief history of survivalism

Prior to prepping there was survivalism, a Cold War-era practice focused on practical approaches to potential cultural and environmental disasters. One of the primary concerns of survivalists was the possibility of nuclear war. This was a threat which they felt was brought about by scientists, elites and politicians willing to sacrifice citizens in the name of geopolitics. Many survivalists, as a result, were distrustful of heavy-handed government and globalisation – they often dodged taxes and the law while relying heavily on the perceived autonomy enshrined by the US Constitution.

Kurt Saxon, the man who coined the term survivalism, advocated for armed revolution and wrote primers on how to create improvised weapons and munitions. Some survivalists, following his lead, became radicalised as they worked to cultivate self-sufficiency by breaking away from government oversight. Both Timothy McVeigh, the Oklahoma City Bomber, and David Koresh, the Waco Branch Davidian leader, were deeply invested in the practice. 

In the 1980s and 1990s, the US government persecuted and prosecuted many survivalists in an effort to stamp out the movement, which by that time included up to three million Americans. Some of the names involved, such as Randy Weaver (at Ruby Ridge), Bo Gritz (supposedly the inspiration for Rambo), and William Stanton (of the Montana Freemen) became household names. Their suppression gave rise to wider frustrations and further anti-government sentiment. Determining that people were becoming “paranoid”, the government then ratcheted up surveillance, which just led to more militancy.  

Most preppers today, in contrast, take a distinctly defensive stance in an effort to distance themselves from the politics of early survivalists, focusing more on practicalities than partisan ideological debates. Yet media-driven perceptions often paint crude portraits of them. Walking through the multi-million dollar Survival Condo, built with full planning permission from the State of Kansas, it is obvious that a lot has changed in a few short decades.

Survival Condo

When Hall took me on a tour of the condo in 2018, he explained that “the whole idea was that we could build a green doomsday structure that someone can use as a second home that also happens to be a nuclear-hardened bunker”. Hall called it a safe, self-contained, and sustainable “experiment in architecture” – the subterranean equivalent of the Arizona State University Biosphere 2 project. 

The Branch Davidian sect in Waco, Texas – subject to a siege in 1993 – was partly built on survivalist teachings (Credit: Getty Images)

Biosphere 2, also known as the “Greenhouse Ark”, was one of the most ambitious projects in communal isolation ever orchestrated. The three-acre complex had seven “biomes” under glass. In 1991, a crew of four men and four women locked themselves into see if they could survive in a closed system for two years. It concluded with “infighting among the scientists, malnutrition, and other social and environmental pitfalls”, according to one of the original crew members. Hall, however, remained convinced he could improve on the model:

“This is a completely closed system. People try to build systems like this on their farms and they get infiltrated by bugs… rain and wind damage. We’ve removed all those factors.”

Hall said that his bunker was good practise for closed systems, such as space travel. Bunkers like Survival Condo, found as far afield as remote villages in Thailand, are distinctly private endeavours that seek to use renewable technologies to decrease dependence on state infrastructure. Survival Condo is also part of a growing desire to “prep” in the most sustainable way possible without necessarily forgoing the comforts of late capitalism. This is a worldview steeped in dread about the speculative unknown. 

But it’s not cheap to buy your way out of the existential conundrum. A “penthouse” in the condo would set you back $4.5m (£3.7m) while a half-floor unit comes in at around $1.5m (£1.2m). Since “doomstead” mortgages are yet a thing, only cash buyers need apply. Incredibly, not only has Hall sold every space in the first silo, he’s now building out a second one, 20 minutes away. This fact reflects an obvious, and growing, unease about the future. 

At another location in South Dakota called the xPoint, which I have visited a number of times over the last few years, residents have stumped up $25-$35,000 (£20-£28,500) for empty concrete bunkers in the middle of the Great Plains. Originally built during World War One to store munitions, these 575 bunkers are now fast becoming the largest prepper community on Earth. 

Back in Kansas, I followed Hall through one of the 16,000lb (7.2 tonne) blast doors that can be “locked down” at a moment’s notice. He waved me over to the nuclear, biological, and chemical air filtration unit for the condo and explained that they had three military-grade filters each providing 2,000-cubic feet per minute of filtration, that “were $30,000 (£24,400) a pop”, says Hall. “I put $20m (£16m) into this place and when you start buying military-grade equipment from the government you wouldn’t believe how quickly you get to that number,” he said.

Hall’s team had drilled 45, 300-ft (91m) deep subterranean geothermal wells and built in a water filtration system that used UV sterilisation and carbon paper filters. The system can filter 10,000 gallons (45,400 litres) of water a day into three electronically-monitored 25,000-gallon (113,500-litre) tanks. Power to the bunker is supplied by five different redundant systems – so, if one goes down, there are four backups. This is crucial, since as a life support system, losing power would kill everyone in the facility.

The bunker Larry Hall has transformed was originally built to launch Atlas nuclear missiles (Credit: Getty Images)

Hall says: “We’ve got a bank of 386 submarine batteries with a life of 15 or 16 years. We’re currently running at 50–60kW, 16–18 of which are coming from the wind turbine… However, we can’t do solar here… because the panels are fragile, and this is, after all, tornado alley. At some point we know that wind turbine is going to go too. I mean it won’t make it through five years of ice storms and hail, so we’ve also got two 100kW diesel generators, each of which could run the facility for 2.5 years.

Survival Condo has both private and communal areas, as you might find in any high-rise development. But in this tower block, during full lockdown mode there can be no external support. It must function as a closed system, where people are kept both healthy and busy until they are able to emerge. 

Experiments in enclosed life-support systems conducted by the military (for submarines) and scientists (for spacecraft) have often neglected to consider social systems after lockdown. Hall says he recognises that sustainability is not simply about technical functionality. On my tour he opened another door to a 50,000-gallon (227,000-litre) indoor swimming pool verged by a rock waterfall, lounge chairs and a picnic table. It was much like a scene from a holiday resort – but without the Sun.

At the theatre and lounge level, we sat in leather recliners and watched a 4k screening of the Bond movie, Skyfall. The cinema was connected to the bar, which was intended to act as “neutral ground” for future residents. They had a beer keg system and one of the residents had provided 2,600 bottles of wine from her restaurant to stock the wine rack. As he showed me this, Hall insisted that recreation, sharing and community was as important to the condo’s design and management as the technical systems.

Given the severe limitations of underground living, anything extraneous must be eliminated. The entire building must be thought of as a single unit, where the actions of each resident inevitably effects all other residents. This is what makes the bunker more like a submarine than a tower block. In the event of a major incident, the umbilical cord to the world on the other side of the blast doors would be snipped and the clock would start ticking to a resupply.

On the other hand, in an era of surveillance dominated by what some deem to be a concerted push by Silicon Valley elites to eviscerate all forms of privacy, subterranea may be humanity’s last refuge against total transparency – at least for now. One prepper I interviewed suggested that the bunker he was building in eastern America was the best escape plan possible. He told me: “We can’t build a celestial ark like Elon Musk, we can’t leave the Earth, so we’re going to go into the earth. I’m building a spaceship in the Earth.”

The consultant

Inside the Survival Condo, Hall said, would also be a system of rotating jobs for the five years, both so that people would be occupied (“People on vacation constantly get destructive tendencies”) and so that they would individually learn the different critical operations in the bunker. This was a lesson learned from the ASU’s Biosphere 2 project. In fact, Hall hired a consultant who had worked on Biosphere 2 to assist in the planning of the Survival Condo who went over everything in meticulous detail. From the colours and textures on the walls to the LED lighting to help prevent depression. As Hall said:

“People come in here and they want to know why people need all this “luxury” – the cinema, rock climbing wall, table tennis, video games, shooting range, sauna, library and everything… but what they don’t get is that this isn’t about luxury, this stuff is key to survival.”

The bunker’s entrance betrays little of the scale of the facility below ground (Credit: Bradley Garrett)

Hall believes that if these amenities are not built in, the brain keeps a subconscious score of “abnormal things” which is when depression or cabin fever creeps in. What he said next will no doubt have a strong resonance to all those in Covid-19 lockdown:

“Whether you’re woodworking or just taking the dog for a walk, it’s crucial that people feel they are living a relatively normal life – even if the world is burning outside. People want good quality food and water, to feel safe and to feel they’re working together towards a common purpose. This thing’s got to function like a miniature cruise ship.”

During the early days of the Cold War, governments, military and universities conducted numerous experiments to see how long people could withstand being trapped underground together. In a 1959 government study in Pleasant Hill, California, 99 prisoners were confined in underground lockdown for two weeks (an experiment which would never receive ethics approval these days). When they emerged, “everyone was in good health and spirits”, according to a spokesperson for the group. It seemed people could adapt and make do – just so long as they knew the situation was temporary. It was like a period of submergence in a submarine: cramped and uncomfortable, but tolerable as long as a plan to surface was in place, a destination in time plotted. This was precisely the model Hall was operating on – though rather than two weeks, Hall was planning for up to five years in lockdown.

Both womb and tomb

Over 60 metres (200ft) below the surface of the Earth, we looked over racks filled with 25-year shelf-life food stored on the grocery store level – a convincing replica of a supermarket, complete with shopping baskets, an espresso machine behind the counter and a middle-class American aesthetic.

Hall said they needed low black ceilings, beige walls, a tile floor and nicely presented cases because if people were locked in this building and they had to come down here to rifle through cardboard boxes to get their food, they would soon get depressed.

It was also necessary to implement a rule that no one could take more than three days’ worth of groceries because shopping is “a social event”. Hall said that “since everything in here is already paid for, you need to encourage people to come down here to smell bread and make a coffee and to chat or barter supplies and services”.

We visited one of the completed 1,800-sq ft condos, which felt like a clean, predictable hotel room. I looked out of one of the windows and was shocked to see that it was night outside. I guessed we must have been underground for more than a few hours at this point.

I had completely forgotten we were underground. Hall picked up a remote control and flicked on a video feed being piped into the “window” – an LED screen – much like you might see in a futuristic film. Oak leaves suddenly shuddered in the foreground just in front of our cars, parked outside the blast door. In the distance, the camouflaged sentry posted at the chain link fence was standing in the same place as when we arrived.

These empty bunkers on the Great Plains have become the largest “prepper” community on the planet (Credit: Bradley Garrett)

The screens can be loaded up with material or have a live feed piped in, but most people prefer to know what time of day it is than to see a beach in San Francisco or whatever,” Hall explained. “The thing the consultant drilled in again and again was that my job as the developer was to make this place as normal as possible. All that security infrastructure, you want people to know how it works and how to fix it, but we don’t want to be reminded all the time that you are basically living in a spaceship or a submarine.”

Emerging from the chrysalis

But all this preparation is for life during lockdown. Is there any prepping going on for life after the blast doors re-open? One prepper named Auggie, who was building a large-scale bunker in Thailand, told me: “I imagine walking through the doors of the bunker when it’s finally finished and feeling the anxiety drop out of my body. I imagine spending time in there with my family, safe and secure, becoming my best version of myself.” Another in South Dakota, when questioned about what they might do in their bunker, said: 

“Well, you could do anything, you could learn how to meditate, you could learn how to levitate, you could learn how to walk through walls. When you get rid of all the distractions and crap around us keeping us from doing these things, who knows what you can accomplish?”

The bunker is imagined by some as a chrysalis for transformation into a “model self”, where preparations lead to a perfectly routine existence after which time a person can emerge as a superior version of themselves. Many of us experienced this playing out during the early weeks of the Covid-19 pandemic, which for some brought relief from unwanted travel obligations and for others provided a productive period of isolation and privacy. A utopia for some was a disaster for others, who were without the resources to hunker down and were left jobless, sick, and dead.

So in this sense, the rational, orderly, planned space of the bunker is the antithesis of what some see as the pointless acceleration and accumulation of modern life. These narratives contrast the media’s representation of prepping and bunker building as a gloomy, dystopian practice. My research found that prepping is ultimately hopeful, if a little selfish. Selfish because the preppers are looking out for themselves, given that they don’t trust the government to do so. However, as many of them have made clear to me during the current pandemic, the fact that they are self-sufficient has alleviated pressure on critical resources and health-care facilities, putting an altruistic spin on what looks to be a self-centred endeavour. Unlike survivalists, the goal of the prepper is not to exit society, but to help prop it up through personal preparedness.   

This cross section shows the full scale of the bunker, built in an old missile silo (Credit: SurvivalCondo.com)

One bunker builder in California explained to me that that “no one wants to go into the bunker as much as they want to come out of the bunker”. As such, the bunker is a form of transportation, but one that instead of transporting bodies and material through space, it transports them through time.

Hope from dread

To preppers, the bunker is both a controlled laboratory in which to build better selves, a place to reassert lost agency and a chrysalis from which to be reborn after a necessary “reset” of a messy, complicated and fragile world.

In the light of the Covid-19 pandemic it has become clear that the preppers are not social anomalies, but gatekeepers to understanding the contemporary human condition – just as survivalists of the past were a reflection of Cold War anxieties. Spaces like the Survival Condo seem improbable, if not impossible, but it’s the choice to build them that matters, because in action hope can spawn from dread. As Hall suggested at the end of our tour:

“This was not a space of hope. The defensive capability of this structure only existed to the extent needed to protect a weapon, a missile – this bunker was a weapon system. So, we converted a weapon of mass destruction into the complete opposite.”

But what the preppers are building is less important than our need to understand that prepping refracts underlying anxieties created by inequality, austerity, shrinking trust in government, despondency about globalisation and the speed of technological and social change. The Covid-19 pandemic is only likely to increase people’s dread – and therefore willingness – to normalise prepping practices. So it may well be that the future of humanity is not in the stars after all – but deep under the surface of the Earth. 

* Bradley Garrett’s new book Bunker: Building for the End Times, will be published by Allen Lane in August.

This article originally appeared on The Conversation, and is republished under a Creative Commons licence.

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Coal Bunker Sizing | Resources

Sizes and Capacities

Choosing a Coal Bunker should be simple and straightforward, but can sometimes be more complex than you think. This guide explains how Coal Bunker capacities are measured, suggests capacities dependent upon application, and summarises which solid fuels are suitable for bunker storage and which aren’t.

When a bag of Coal isn’t a Bag of Coal

Historically, many Coal Bunker manufacturers have used the term ‘Bag of Coal’ or simply ‘Bags’  to describe the storage capacity of their bunkers. The terminology dates from a time when almost every bag of coal weighed a hundredweight (1 cwt) or there abouts, equivalent to approximately 50kgs today. So unsurprisingly a 3cwt bunker was known simply as a ‘3 bag’, a 6cwt bunker was a ‘6 bag’ and a 12cwt bunker was a ‘12 bag’.

However, in the intervening years, as well as a switch away from Imperial measures to metric, bags of coal have also got smaller. Whilst home delivered coal is often still sold in 50kgs capacity bags, a typical bag at a wholesale fuel supplier today might weigh 25kgs or even as little as 20kgs. Some pre-pack bags on forecourt sites can even weigh as little as 10kgs. So a ‘3 bag’ Coal Bunker, could accommodate as many as fifteen 10kgs bags of coal purchased from a forecourt site. And a ‘12 bag’ Coal Bunker could actually hold twenty-four 25kgs bags of coal purchased from a wholesale fuel supplier.

Despite the move towards smaller bags of fuel, the terminology used to describe Coal Bunkers has largely remain unchanged. Confusing, isn’t it? To overcome the confusion, we think it best to label Coal Bunkers by the approximate weight of Group 2 Household Coal they can store in kilograms (kgs), rather than by the number of bags of they can hold:

Table 1 Coal Bunker Capacity

Model	Capacity	Capacity	50kgs Bags	25kgs Bags	20kgs Bags	10kgs Bags
3 Bag	3cwt	150kgs	3 Bags	6 Bags	7. 5 Bags	15 Bags
6 Bag	6cwt	300kgs	6 Bags	12 Bags	15 Bags	30 Bags
10 Bag	10 cwt	500kgs	10 Bags	20 Bags	25 Bags	50 Bags
12 Bag	12cwt	600kgs	12 Bags	24 Bags	30 Bags	60 Bags

Fuel Density

Just as not all bags of coal are created equal, neither are all coals. Some have a greater density than others, whilst some have a lesser density. So, if your preferred coal has a higher density than Group 2 Household Coal, you’ll be able to get more into your bunker. And if it’s less dense, you’ll be able to fit in less. Your Solid Fuel supplier can advise the relative density of different coal and fuel types.

Suggested Capacities

The easiest way to determine how much storage you require is to monitor how much fuel you use each week and decide how many weeks’ supply you wish to store. However, if you’re new to solid fuel,  then you may wish to refer instead to the guidelines below:

150kgs  Single Fire or Stove

300kgs  Small, Solid Fuel Central Heating System or up to 3 Fires / Stoves

600kgs  Large Solid Fuel Central Heating System

More than just Coal Bunkers

Whereas once the terms ‘Solid Fuel’ and ‘Coal’ were interchangeable, today there is probably a wider choice of solid fuels than ever before. Whilst most are suitable for bunker storage, Kiln Dried Logs, Wood Pellets and Wood Chips should always be stored in specialist containers.

And as as well as storing solid fuel, Coal Bunkers have a wide range of other applications too… storing anything from wellie boots to animal feed and almost anything in-between.

Queries? Questions?

If you require further guidance or assistance on choosing the ideal Coal Bunker, you’re very welcome to get in touch with us. You can call us on 01789 632 151 in the UK, Channel Islands and Isle of Man, 01 5268 642 in the Republic of Ireland or e-mail [email protected]. We’re open from 9am to 5pm weekdays – excluding Bank and Public Holidays.

Garbage container, BN8 bunker, street bin, eurocontainer.

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Catalog of goods

bunkers, containers for KGM

Containers, Metallic TBCs

Eurocontiners for MSW and RSO Plastic

Containers for separate garbage collection

Urn Street

Urn for premises

other equipment containers bunkers

Storage container for batteries and accumulators

Multi-lift container

Sandboxes

LLC “Firma Spetsmekhanizatsiya” offers rational containers for collecting, storing, transporting waste and garbage: Euro-containers, bunkers, garbage containers and tanks, bins and much more.

Since 1998 we have been manufacturing and selling equipment for MSW and LGM.

All metal containers for multilift (hook and cable grip) from 10 to 40 cu. meters, hoppers from 5 to 10 cubic meters. meters for MSW and KGM, container for MSW 0.75 and 0.8 cubic meters. meters, as well as eurocontainers 1.1 cubic meters. meters we manufacture at our production facilities in the Tver region.

In the process of designing and manufacturing metal containers for multi-lifts and bunker trucks, we were guided by operating experience in Russia, as well as norms and standards developed in Germany (DIN 30722, DIN 30720), Sweden (SS 3020, SS 3021), Finland (SFS 4417 ), France (NF R 17-108) for waste containers. Galvanized container 1.1 cu. meters for garbage is made by us in accordance with the European standard (DIN 30700, EN 840-3) In Russia there are no standards and GOSTs for waste containers.

On our website you will see photos of metal waste containers and bins only of our production.

Waste bins and bins, offered in a wide variety of plastic and metal, fully meet the requirements of modern recycling. They are durable, easy to use, have various volumes and purposes.

Our advantages:

– We have all the necessary documents for the production of waste containers.

– Waste containers manufactured by our company are suitable for Russian and imported garbage trucks, bunker trucks (straight loaders) and multi-lifts (hook loaders).

– All waste storage and transport containers are certified.

– The warranty period for garbage containers is up to 1 year.

– Waste container produced by our company lasts up to 7 years.

News

10 of 29

06/05/2017

S-BOXX container without stiffeners at WasteTech 2017 in Moscow

We invite you to our booth W3.1 at the open area of ​​WasteTech 2017 in Moscow.

We present our new S-BOXX without ribs for waste.

Wastetech 2017 takes place from 6 to 8 June at the Crocus Expo IEC in Moscow.

We will be glad to see you at our booth.

22.02.2017

Garbage container 36 cubic meters with a straight bottom.

Waste container 36 m3 with a straight bottom.

30.12.2016

Happy New Year!

Happy New Year!

05/17/2016

Closed container 20 cubic meters equipped for the aspiration system of a woodworking enterprise.

Closed container 20 m3 equipped for the aspiration system of a woodworking enterprise.

02. 03.2016

City Waste container for Kromann hooklift on Dongfeng DFA 1120 chassis (4×2)

City Container 19 cub.m. for garbage for Kromann multi-lift chassis Dongfeng DFA 1120 (4×2).
This car does not fall under the system of toll collection (PLATON) for driving on federal highways from trucks with a gross weight of more than 12 tons.

01/19/2016

Container 27 cubic meters for transportation of scrap metal on a hook loader with a hydraulic manipulator

Container 27 m3 for the transportation of scrap metal on a multi-lift with an EPSILON Palfinger grab.

08.12.2015

Licensing of waste management activities

December 8, 2015. Alexander Khloponin held a meeting on the licensing of waste management activities

A decision was made to extend the mandatory licensing period until July 1, 2016, as well as the need for the ministries to complete work on the formation of relevant regulations and procedures as soon as possible.

http://government.ru/news/20941/

10/14/2015

Exhibition “WASMA 2015” (27-29.10.2015 Moscow)

We invite you to visit our booth at the WASMA exhibition http://www.wasma.ru

held in Moscow at the Sokolniki Exhibition and Convention Center, pavilion 4 (Sokolniki metro station).

We are waiting for you at our booth A301.

17.07.2015

Tipper container for multilift

Container with tipper door for multi-lift.
One of the uses for glass breakage.

07/15/2015

Container for reloading garbage 40 cubic meters.

Waste container 40 cu. meters. Internal dimensions 7000*2500*2250 mm. It can only be transported on a trailer.

Metal hoppers for bulk materials, polymer raw materials

• Goods that can be stored in bins

• Applications and features of storage bins

• Types of bunkers according to the method of application

• Hopper storage

• Receiving hopper

• Hopper feeder

• Dosing hopper

• Design and manufacture of bunkers for bulk materials

• Lining

• Anti-corrosion treatment of bunkers

• Benefits of using metal bins

• In front of ground warehouses

• Compared to plastic bags (sleeves)

• Compared to concrete silos

• Used metal storage bins

• Conclusion

Goods that can be stored in silos

Metal silos can store a wide variety of bulk materials. The shape, design and purpose of the storage silo depends on the nature of the product placed in the bunker, on its properties and requirements for its use.

The following is just a small list of materials that can be contained in silos:

• foodstuffs: flour, seeds, grains, dry food;
• building materials: sand, cement, sawdust, crushed stone, asphalt concrete mixtures, granite screenings, expanded clay gravel, lime;
• fuel materials: coal, pellets.

Hopper coating materials and technological equipment depend on the properties of the working environment.

Applications and features of storage bins

Metal storage bins, as the name suggests, are designed to contain various bulk materials. These designs are very practical, since if they are available, there is no need to build additional storage facilities and purchase special containers.

The process of unloading materials in the presence of a hopper does not require a large number of workers. In the lower part of the bunker there are gates for unloading and feeders for dosed delivery. The types of bunkers according to the method of application will be discussed below.

Externally, bulk solids storage bins are a cylinder that has been turned upside down. This is what most models look like, but silos can also be shaped like a cube, square or rectangle. In the lower part of this design there is a cone with a distribution mechanism. All models are made of metal, which is resistant to corrosion.

Containers can be installed individually or in multiples. It all depends on the scope and characteristics of the goods stored inside. Bunkers can equally be located both outdoors and indoors. In order for them to stand firmly on the ground, supporting structures and work platforms for the service group are used. Mandatory presence of an inspection hatch and a loading pipe.

Easy to empty the hopper. Everything that is contained inside is poured out under its own pressure through holes in the funnels at the bottom, which is typical not only for bulk materials.

Types of silos by application

In modern industry, several basic types of silos for storing bulk materials are used:

• storage hopper;
• adoptive;
• feed hopper;
• dosing hopper.

Let’s dwell on each type in more detail.

Hopper

This model has an extremely simple principle of operation: loading is carried out through the top, and unloading is carried out using a funnel at the bottom. The shape of such bunkers is square or rectangular, which is explained by the ease of creation and maintenance.

The inner area can be solid or divided into cells. Protection for the insides is a special lining. It protects the surface from scratches and dirt.

Receiving hopper

The scope of the receiving hopper is extremely wide. They are used:

• in the agricultural industry;
• in the coal mining industry;
• in the mining and chemical industries;
• for the production of building materials.

When working with bulk materials of ore origin (coal, ore), continuous operation is required from a metal hopper. If there is a downtime during the supply of ore, there is a downtime in production. If the bunker overflows with ore, it can lead to a serious accident.

During loading and unloading, the process of ore segregation can be clearly seen.

Feeder

This type of hopper is responsible for the constant and uninterrupted supply of material to the crushing department. Such a metal silo is a kind of intermediary between this department and transport. Feeding hoppers are widely used in any production that is associated with crushing, in particular, in cement and crushed stone plants, processing plants, etc.

The loading and unloading process is standard, as in other designs for bulk materials. Hoppers-feeders are produced with three types of unloading: one-sided, two-sided and central. The type depends on the speed of transport and the volume of material.

Allowable funnel angle for easy dumping is 50 degrees. More complex materials will require an angle of 60 degrees .

Dosing hopper

The key to quality production in many industries is the correct dosing of a particular bulk material. Without special devices, it is extremely difficult to determine the weight of such substances, and in fact the quality of products often depends on the exact dosage.

This is the purpose of the dosing hoppers. There are several types of these units according to the type of supply – continuous and discrete. There are also two types of dosing – weight and volume. Many agree that dispensers with automatic regulators demonstrate maximum efficiency. Thanks to this brainchild of progress, managing the process becomes much easier.

Design and manufacture of bins for bulk materials

The design of the storage bin and its volume are selected with such an eye to guarantee the performance of various tasks – receiving, storing, issuing. Metal silos are:

• vertical and horizontal;
• cylindrical, cubic, rectangular and other geometric shapes;
• with conical or flat bottoms;
• with top or bottom discharge;
• with and without supports.

For the storage of some bulk materials (flour, sawdust) it will be necessary to install several low-capacity units that will be included in one technological chain. This will keep the goods flowing.

The material from which the hopper is made is selected based on operating conditions (for example, the climate of the region where the structure will be installed, or the location). Stainless steel is the preferred material. Fiberglass or plastic are also used.

Lining

This process protects the interior of the silo from damaging outside influences. Thus, the service life of the structure is extended, and the quality of the goods in it remains unchanged.

Lining helps to achieve high wear resistance, resistance, good mechanical strength and stiffness of the silo. In addition, the desired friction is achieved when goods are received or dispensed.

Anti-corrosion treatment of hoppers

Standard corrosion treatment for storage bins includes primer and paint. The color is selected based on the personal preferences of the owner, and does not affect the quality.

However, the performance requirements of some bins may require coating with other compounds. It is important to read the detailed instructions before purchasing.

Benefits of using metal silos

In front of aboveground warehouses

The use of metal silos for storing grain and other bulk materials has a number of advantages over warehouses that are located on the ground:

• area occupied by the bunker. It requires much less space than a warehouse, which is very important if the territory of the site is limited or its cost is very high;
• in metal bins, it is very easy to maintain optimal conditions for storing grain and other bulk materials. There you can adjust the temperature, control the spread of insects, etc. In the future, this storage method will save the company a considerable amount of money;
• low operating and installation costs. Compared to the amounts that will have to be spent on maintaining warehouses, spending on maintaining silos looks simply miserable. This is achieved by automating loading, unloading and other processes in the bunker. As for the installation costs, metal containers are assembled from ready-made elements according to the principle of a huge designer. The procedure is quite simple.

Compared to plastic bags (sleeves)

Bags have been and remain a budget way to store bulk materials, but do they provide the desired quality? This method has significant disadvantages compared to storage in metal silos:

• Unlike bags, goods can be stored in bins without loss of quality much longer. Metal structures will provide full control over the temperature regime and the ventilation system, which is not even mentioned in the sleeves;
• the volume of steel structures is much larger, and the occupied area is less. The sleeves have a limited capacity – no more than 200 tons;
• Wet goods can be loaded into steel bins. With the help of forced intensive aeration produced inside, the amount of moisture can be reduced;
• water does not get into the bunkers during rain and snow, they are also reliably protected from rodents and birds, as well as any mechanical impact;
• steel silos are easy to unload, while it is very difficult to unload goods from a plastic bag.

The only advantage of plastic bags compared to storage bins is their more loyal cost. However, the use of sleeves is not justified even with low investment.

Compared to concrete silos

Concrete silos last longer than metal silos and have better temperature control. However, they cost an order of magnitude more expensive, and the cost of their creation will also be much higher. At the same time, their total capacity and tightness will be the same.

On certain types of soil it will be extremely difficult to install a concrete silo, while metal structures are ready for installation in any area.

Modern steel bins are coated with special polymers that significantly increase their service life.

Do not forget that all parts for metal silos are produced at the factory, while the process of pouring concrete structures is influenced by a number of conditions: concrete delivery, weather conditions, labor intensity of the process.

Aeration is much easier in steel silos.

Used metal storage bins

If you decide to purchase a bulk solids storage bin that has already been in someone’s hands, carefully examine the condition of the goods. Check the tightness, accuracy of all mechanisms and other parameters. Otherwise, you will get a kind of “pig in a poke”.

Even if everything was in order during the initial inspection, no one can guarantee that a breakdown will not occur in the near future. But the used bunker will no longer have a warranty period of service and free service. In addition, some part of the design documentation may be missing .

Undoubtedly, the big advantage of buying a used hopper is its price. For equipment that has already been used, you will pay much less. However, think carefully about such a purchase so that such savings do not go sideways to you in the near future.

Conclusion

Bulk material storage bins are a great solution that saves many companies a lot of problems. It is easy to use, reliable, roomy, easy to install. All these qualities make metal bunkers leaders in the agricultural equipment sales market.

Centralized systems for drying and supplying materials to the processing site. P.3 Case Studies

FROM THEORY TO PRACTICE

Pharmaceutical industry

Guangzhou Biotechnology Co., Ltd. is a high-tech biomedical company specializing in the research and production of blood purification medical products.

SHINI’s centralized raw material loading system maintains seven sets of extrusion blow molding machines, thus providing the functions of storage, transportation, preparation, and fully automatic measurement of the amount of processed material.

In production, 2 types of primary polymer raw materials are used, as well as waste in the form of gates generated during the production of products. The raw material storage tank has an optimal height for easy material loading by the operator. The raw materials warehouse houses two material storage bins and three sets of SGB gravimetric weighers used for high-precision material mixing and feeding. The SGB dispensers used automatically dose the recycled material. When it is not enough, dispensers automatically replace it with primary raw materials. All plastic waste generated during the production of products is transported to the shredders by a belt conveyor, and after shredding, they are fed to dispensers.

The system also includes several SCVG central vacuum generators for material transport, four SCSF central filters to remove dust from the material. This system allows you to significantly increase the efficiency of transportation and the level of automation, significantly reduce human participation in the technological process, and significantly reduce the number of possible errors. Material transport is centralized, controlled by SCCS system with 10.4 inch screen, which allows you to control the transport system. The equipment is connected to several SCVG central vacuum generators, as well as four common SCSF filters for centralized transportation. The conveying system greatly improves the work efficiency and automation level, which greatly reduces the production cost.

Estimated cost of this set of equipment is $230,000（including hydroelectric system）assuming the customer already had his own equipment fleet.

Electrical

Jiangxi Co., Ltd.

The centralized raw material preparation and supply system implemented in this company’s production includes central feeding system, drying equipment and raw material mixing equipment. The raw material from the tank is fed into the drying bins through a centralized supply system, after which the dried raw material is transferred to injection molding machines.

The company stores raw materials on the ground floor, which makes it easier to transport and move the material. The main equipment is located on the second floor, as well as a warehouse for raw materials and finished products. In addition, a central cooling system is installed on the second floor, equipped with a water pump and a system for adaptive power change when the system characteristics change. The water pressure in the system is always stable, thus ensuring the stability of the production process.

Three- and five-axis servo-driven industrial robots can perform a variety of tasks such as stacking in a certain order, placing embedded elements in a mold, stacking. The robots are designed for installation on injection molding machines with a locking force of up to 3600 tons. The manipulator synchronizes its operation with the conveyor, which allows for fully automatic removal and transportation of finished products

Estimated cost of this set of equipment $820,0000003

Household Appliances

In 1984, the Household Appliance Company was founded in Shandong to manufacture, sell and service household appliances and related accessories. It is a major home appliance brand in China.

At the factory, SHINI designed a centralized raw material supply system for 6 injection molding machines, one of which is two-color. The installation of the central heating system resulted in the following improvements:

1. The centralized storage of raw materials and the filter system are installed away from the casting production area, which significantly reduces pollution in the production areas.

2. We managed to significantly reduce the noise from the operation of the equipment, optimize the working space of the workshop.

3. The raw material distribution station allows you to quickly switch the supply of different types of raw materials between machines, which makes it more convenient to implement the subsequent expansion of the equipment fleet.

In this system, the drying hopper is installed directly on the inlet of the injection molding machine, and the receiving hopper of the loading system is installed on the drying hopper itself. The used SHR-PU series receiving bins are suitable for handling various types of powder raw materials. Depending on the content of the powder fraction, different filter elements can be used.

The system is equipped with SHINI’s latest raw material storage bin. This series of silos offers many different combinations with a maximum capacity of 52 m³, which can be easily adapted to individual customer needs. It has a modular design, which is convenient for transportation and assembly on site. It also allows you to increase the volume of the bunker by installing additional modular elements. The silos can be equipped with SSW devices, which allow real-time monitoring of raw material consumption.

s-Link Technology

At present, SHINI’s plastic recycling peripheral equipment adopts s-Link technology, which makes it easy to realize the interconnection and transmission of production data of the injection molding process. This technology uses standard communication interfaces and is based on a universal open protocol for integrating auxiliary equipment control functions into injection molding machine computers. On the control panel of the system, a centralized function for controlling the operation of the injection molding machine and auxiliary equipment is implemented. This technology differs from the traditional simple scheme of remote control of the operation of auxiliary equipment, such as “on / off” power or temperature control, instead, it collects data and operating parameters from the controllers of all auxiliary equipment, and allows all auxiliary equipment to be remotely controlled. Compared with the separate and disjointed control methods of traditional injection molding machines and auxiliary equipment, the injection control system integrated with sLink technology makes the entire injection molding process more efficient and intelligent.

First part of the article HERE

Second part of the article HERE

Hoppers and silos in agriculture: convenient storage and preservation of crops

Harvesting is one of the most important tasks in agriculture. And when it comes to bulk products, primarily cereals, bunkers and silos are the best way to store them.
Why is crop storage so important? Because at the time of harvesting prices are minimal, but during the season they rise. This allows the farmer, who has securely placed the grain in industrial containers, to choose the best time for sale himself. As a result, you can achieve maximum profitability of production.

Enterprises that use grain in the manufacture of their products also need the safety of purchased raw materials. Bunkers and silos are the very option that allows you to achieve the safety of grain even during long-term storage. So, buying during the harvest season, you can use cheap raw materials of excellent quality all year round.

Although bunkers and silos are similar, they are not the same. These containers differ in proportions and volumes.

Agricultural hoppers

Bulk material storage hopper is a container with a small height compared to the plan dimensions (the ratio of the height to the largest plan dimension is less than 1. 5). The most common bins are cylindrical. The main function is storage. Loading is carried out from above, and unloading – from below through a funnel. Standard dimensions of the bunker cell: 6…8 m, bunker height: 9…12 m. In addition to cylindrical bins, there are square and rectangular containers.

Hoppers are stationary and mobile, single or multi-cell. Although above-ground containers are predominantly used in agriculture, underground and semi-ground varieties have also found use.

Bunkers are installed on columns in the corners of the bunker cells. Ceilings with openings for grain loading can be installed from above.

At large agricultural enterprises, bunkers are combined into a rack, which allows you to quickly load railway cars.

Silos for agriculture

A bulk material silo is a container that is taller than a hopper (ratio of height to largest cross-sectional dimension greater than 1.5). The most widely used silos are round and square sections. But round ones are still preferable, since their walls work for central tension. Standard silo dimensions: 6…24 m, height: up to 30 m.

The size of the silo, shape, location in the plan are determined by the conditions of loading and unloading, features of the technological process, technical and economic considerations.

Several silos connected together form a silo building. These are part of agricultural facilities, for example, grain elevators. They are optimal for storing agricultural raw materials (grain, flour) and finished products (cereals, pasta, semi-finished products).

Silos are loaded pneumatically or mechanically, unloaded by gravity through an opening in the bottom.

Materials from which industrial containers are made

Bunkers and silos are reinforced concrete, metal, mixed and fiberglass. Tanks are created monolithic or prefabricated.

Reinforced concrete structures are increasingly remnants of the Soviet era. Modern industrial containers for agriculture are mainly made of galvanized sheet, often corrugated, or reinforced with fiberglass. These materials have high strength, excellent behavior in any temperature conditions, are practically not subject to corrosion and can be in operation for decades.

Corrugated steel and the use of vertical stiffeners are good for directing the load more efficiently towards the base of the silo or hopper.

Accessories for silos and hoppers

Silos and silos are more than just containers for storing agricultural raw materials and products, they are also elements that are responsible for quality, because the correct design determines whether the contents will rot and deteriorate. Their design is quite complex, which makes loading and unloading much easier than years ago.

A gallery for loading equipment is installed on top of the silo or bunker body, and a room for unloading the contents is provided below.

Farmers and agricultural enterprises can choose the complete set of bunkers and silos:

• fixing brackets;
• roofs with vents, weather resistant to avoid fogging and moisture accumulation;
• cornice retainers;
• ventilation holes;
• stairs and stair railings;
• doors;
• lighting system;
• vibratory caving system;
• pneumatic collapse system;
• agitators;
• screw units;
• bayonet closures;
• pendulum valves;
• sluice feeders;
• viewing windows;
• hatches;
• backfill level sensors.

Most Russian and foreign manufacturers of agricultural containers offer not only standard products, but also individual production.

Bunker and silo heating

Earlier we talked about this in the article Modern methods of heating bunkers and silos. The article describes the advantages of infrared heating, technical parameters and methods of using thermoelectric mats and infrared cassettes for heating bunkers and silos.

The correct choice of the type of construction is carried out after all the necessary calculations for structural strength, stiffness, snow, wind, temperature loads are taken into account, the weather conditions of the region and the parameters of the free flow of bulk materials along the walls according to SNiP are taken into account.

In any case, modern, properly selected bunkers and silos increase the competitiveness of the agricultural enterprise due to the fact that loading and unloading operations take a minimum of time, and grain and finished products are stored in optimal conditions, while maintaining their quality. 100 liters0156

Plastic containers with a conical bottom

CARTIC FM 120 liters

5600 ₽

SUBSTANCTION FM 240 liters

7700 ₽

Lithers 500 liters

13600 ₽

SUBSTANCE FM 120 liters in a sore of

14700 ₽

Lights 9000 L. in a crate

17800 ₽

Watch FM capacity 1000 liters

18700 ₽

Watch FM capacity 500 liters in a crate

26000 ₽

Watch FM capacity 2000 liters

Fm0 32000 ₽ in crate

39000 ₽

Watch FM 2000 liters in the crate

61000 ₽

SUBSCITY TsT 3000 liters

63000 ₽

TsTS 5000 liters

82000 ₽

TsTS 3000 liters in the crate 9000 121000 ₽

TsT 5000 13000 ₽ View

Custom Conical Tanks

Two Tanks on Base

Tanks for storage and dosing of bulk solids are used in agriculture, the food industry, the production of building mixtures and some other areas. PlastPlant offers customers convenient plastic bins for bulk products made of durable food-grade plastic. We have a range of stationary bins designed to work on conveyors and more compact options – mobile plastic bins on wheels.

The plastic hopper with a cone bottom is very convenient for dosed unloading of the product inside, and the frame with wheels makes it easy to move it around the territory. The ideal moisture regime and the ability to ship part of the grain without contact with the external environment favorably affects the overall shelf life of the product. All these properties have made containers of this type extremely popular in agriculture and the food industry.

Design and function

Silos for stationary storage of products have volumes up to 100 tons. The shape is cylindrical with a flat bottom and powerful stiffening ribs along the walls. An auger for unloading the product can be located at the bottom, and an inspection hatch on top. The roof can be flat or cone-shaped.

Small hoppers for temporary storage of grain have a support type frame on which a plastic container with a lid and a conical bottom is fixed. The frame height is determined by the product loading method used.

The most efficient technology for the production of large silos and bunkers today is the extrusion welding method.

From automatic equipment, silos are often equipped with vibration devices for uniform product discharge and sensors to control its level.

What products are plastic silos and hoppers intended for?

Plastic bins and silos can be used for the storage and distribution of bulk animal feed, flour, grain sugar and other food products in factories, as well as for dry fertilizer.

Benefits of plastic hoppers

• Convenient design.
• Strength and abrasion resistance.
• Well thought out form factor.
• The material does not affect the properties of the products.
• Service life of at least 50 years.
• Smooth walls with low adhesion – the product does not stick to them.
• Sun and cold resistant.
• Optimal humidity and air circulation.
• Lightweight containers.

How to choose a plastic container for dry food?

• The small plastic dispenser already has a well-thought-out form factor that is highly customized for specific applications. The hoppers for the food industry are made of abrasion-resistant food-grade polypropylene or polyethylene, equipped with a convenient lid on top and an elongated dispensing cone on the bottom. As a rule, they are adapted for fixed mounting above the conveyor belt. The volume of the container and the width of the cone nozzle is selected according to the scale of production and the type of product used.
• Agriculture has slightly different requirements – here you need the mobility of the device. Bunkers are most often used for distributing grain feed and for fertilizing. For these purposes, the standard plastic hopper on wheels has become the most convenient option. The device moves easily along the feeders, and it can also be easily delivered to any place for the distribution of fertilizers. In small farms, a plastic bin for bulk products on wheels is also very convenient for long-term storage of grain or fertilizers.
• Silos are the largest plastic containers in terms of volume, designed for long-term storage of dry products in large volumes. Plastic silos are most often made to order according to the individual drawing of the client, since the development of such large-scale containers is a serious matter. In order to save space, the tanks have a cylindrical shape, and volume variations are achieved due to the height of the entire structure.

Any containers for dry products from PlastPlant

We have been manufacturing and selling plastic containers for bulk products for many years, which allowed us to develop and put on the line the most convenient container models in terms of design. Which container to choose depends on the purpose of its acquisition. For long-term storage of feed, large silos with a volume of several tons, with a cone bottom, are used.

For the temporary storage of bulk materials, their distribution and dosing, we offer a range of models of plastic hoppers with a cone bottom in different sizes. You can buy absolutely any version of plastic bunkers currently in use from us. The high quality of the material and the widest range of products harmonize pleasantly with low prices. Choose any container from our catalog or offer your drawing for manufacturing – and we will gladly fulfill all your wishes!

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Bunkers and silos, supply at factory prices

lumpy and other solids – cement, sand, crushed stone, pebbles, gravel, lime, coal, gypsum, grain, seeds, flour, feed and other products with a bulk weight of 1-3 t / m ³ . Widely used in the construction, food, agricultural, chemical, coal and metallurgical industries. By automating the process of loading and unloading stored substances and combining the unloading and storage function, the use of silos and hoppers can significantly save on labor costs and free up enough free space at the facility.

TD SARRZ delivers metal silos and bunkers up to 1000 m3 to the place of operation ³ directly from the manufacturer, which significantly reduces the time and cost of equipment.

Structures of steel silos and bunkers

working product properties (humidity, fraction sizes, angle of repose, density, etc.)

required stock of product

loading / unloading method at the operating site

general layout of equipment at the facility (equipment is installed separately or is part of a silo storage)

geodetic and climatic operating conditions (soil properties, temperature conditions, presence and properties of precipitation)

So, silos and bunkers can have rectangular, square, conical, cylindrical and other shapes.

Silo drawing

0274

One of the important indicators of the efficiency of the silo / bunker is the shape of the dispensing hatch (funnel, outlet), on which the effective delivery of bulk product depends. The shape of the bottom should provide spontaneous metered output of the product with the possibility of complete emptying if necessary. The outlet is made conical or flat. The overall dimensions of hopper silos and bunkers vary between 2.5-11 m in diameter and 5.5-28 m in height. Flat bottom silos and hoppers are 5.5-27 m in diameter and up to 33 m high.

The product is traditionally unloaded from the bottom of the body, for which silos and bunkers are installed on metal support columns, the height of which should ensure free movement of the receiving tank under the unloading funnel and the stability of the entire structure.

The roof of steel silos is usually made flat or conical depending on the properties of the product. It is possible to supply silos without flooring for the storage of material whose properties and quality are not subject to changes under climatic influence.

The design can be provided with a heating system when the silos are installed in an open area. An electric or steam-water heating system must prevent freezing of product fractions.

Also, when operating with certain substances (eg grain), silos and hoppers must be equipped with a ventilation system that maintains the humidity inside at the required level to preserve the properties of the product.

Some bulk solids require additional equipment to be installed in the hopper or silo:

• ventilation and aeration system to maintain humidity inside the sealed hopper/silo
• vibrators to prevent sticking of fine substances
• auger product discharge system

At the request of the Customer, the layout of silo tanks and bunkers with auxiliary equipment is possible:

• automatic dosing equipment with electric or pneumatic drive
• weighing equipment
• filters to prevent dust from entering the container or, conversely, into the air when loading

Methods for making steel silos and hoppers

Like any containers, silos and bunkers are made of stainless, galvanized or carbon steel 8-12 mm thick, depending on the properties of the stored product and operating conditions. Categories Bathroom Floor Home Kitchen Miscellaneous Roof Tree Wall Window Scroll Up