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Wealthy Preppers Are Riding This Out in Multimillion-Dollar Bunkers
Cold War backyard bunkers are out. Subterranean communes are in.
In a sense, all of us are preppers right now: stocking up on toilet paper and nonperishable goods, hunkering down, and avoiding social contact. But then, of course, there are the actual preppers living in high-tech, remote, expensive bunkers to ride out Covid-19.
They knew a disaster was coming, even if they didn’t know it would be a viral pandemic. And for the last few years, author Bradley Garrett has been getting to know them while writing his book Bunker: Building for the End Times, coming out this summer. “The terrible irony is that all of these preppers have been telling me to get ready, talking to me about disasters, and I’ve been incredulous, taking them to task, trying to tease out fact from fiction in their stories,” says Garrett. “And now, here I am, totally underprepared.”
GEN caught up with Garrett to find out what these bunkers look like, how many people fit inside them (a lot!), and the surprising reason some preppers believe their way of life benefits others.
GEN: Is there a distinction between bunker people and prepper people? Is that a Venn diagram or a circle within a circle?
Garrett: I don’t think of it so much as a Venn diagram as a spectrum. On the most basic level, most American households have some sort of emergency kit: a first aid kit, a flashlight, a radio. But the other end of the spectrum are these people who are building these often very elaborate, technically sophisticated, expensive bunker spaces, which are built to weather a long period of time. They might be building for three months, five months, a year. The longest I’ve seen is five years.
It starts to become not a technical problem of how to build the space, but how do you create the social dynamics within that space to be able to weather that amount of time. There’s always going to be a degree of social friction based on what people need. And the inevitable result of that kind of situation is that someone emerges as the tyrant. Somebody says, “We’re not going out. Screw your prescription, you can do without it,” or whatever.
