Hall’s team had drilled 45, 300-ft 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 of water a day into three electronically-monitored 25,000 gallon 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. Hall said:

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 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.

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. That 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 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-square-foot 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.

“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 is 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?