http://motherboard.vice.com/blog/home-at-the-end-of-time
"I was inspired with a very powerful message around 1980 that I needed to build a shelter for 1,000 people deep underground to survive something that was coming that was going to be an extinction event,” he explained in an extensive phone interview. “That’s it, that’s all I had. But it was powerful. So powerful that I had a successful business with 100 employees and I took time off to go up into the mountains and search on weekends looking for an underground mine or cave that could be cartoned and converted.”
Today, Vicino is the owner and founder of
Vivos, a company that sells space in luxury survival complexes around the country. It's what he likes to call “life assurance”--mini underground cities, in effect, for people ride out the end of civilization in a community setting with good food, television, even a potential dating pool. He says demand has increased 1,000 percent this year compared to last—itself a 1,000 percent increase over the year before.
More than 100,000 people have applied for a space in one of his various shelters around the world, in various stages of completion, he says; more than 1,000 people have bought some kind of shelter from Vivos so far. Vivos sells smaller, family-sized shelters for individual purchase, but most of the clients so far have purchased space in the community shelters—a nice bulwark, one supposes, against the kind of isolation and poor planning that could turn a single-family shelter into a Donner Party reunion.
Entrance to a Vivos shelter.
“When we’re done, with the current shelters that are in tow or complete, we will only be able to accommodate 6,000 people,” Vicino said. “That’s less than one-in-a-million people on earth.” As far as he’s concerned, that’s “not enough,” but there’s only so much he can do. Business keeps growing, but he says he’s still several million dollars in the hole.
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Today, six underground complexes are underway in undisclosed locations around the country, including one in Nebraska, and another in the Rockies, respectively designed to accommodate 900 and 1,000 people. Another, designed to hold 2,000 people, is in the works, with “a ton of interest in Australia.”
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“What Vivos is, is a modern-day fortress or citadel, where our members are safe and secure, with all the supplies they need to ride it out. And we can defend the facilities. So if the rest of the world’s gone crazy, our people will at least be in a safe haven,” Vicino said. He wouldn’t elaborate on how, exactly, the fortresses were armed. But he emphasized that they're equipped for “not offensive, but defensive measures.”
“I can tell you, you will never get into the compound. And if you do, once the shelter’s locked down, unless you’re in the military, you’re not getting through the door.”
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There’s a bit of antagonism between Vicino and the survivalists, some of whom have taken to threatening him and threatening to besiege his shelters recently, Vicino said. Kramer, who owns three spaces at the Indiana shelter, noted that there was no love lost. “Survivalists really kinda hate us,” he said. “And we thought we would really appeal to them. But, you know what? They go through so much work… and they don’t like us because people just basically write a check.”