Interview with a bunker builder

Over at Boing Boing Gadgets, intrepid reporter Joel Johnson profiles Len Henrikson who designs safe rooms and bomb shelters. His firm, American Bomb Shelter, sells kits so you can put together your own underground bunker. From Joel's article:

Before he put his mind to designing underground survival shelters, Leonard Henrikson, a gentle Oregonian proud of his Swedish descent, built presses for radioactive waste for the government. But after 9/11, there was again a market for underground survival bunkers. "You couldn't build them fast enough," Henrikson told me.

Henrikson is quick to qualify that he wasn't pitching slapdash shelters up to make a quick buck. "I worked on our shelter design and engineering off and on for six months." He later sold some of his NBC filtration systems—that's "Nuclear, Biological, and Chemical"—to various governments.

Link, Discuss on BB Gadgets

[#1 posted by Skep , October 11, 2007 10:56 AM]

The post was interesting but it sounded a bit like asking an ultra-lite kit plane seller what kind of plane you could build for $10, 000,000. It sounded like the larger scale engineering that would be involved in the alleged Tom Cruise shelter was out of his league.

[#2 posted by Flying Squid , October 11, 2007 11:04 AM]

Do the shelters work? Well, no one has died from being hit by a bomb while in one yet!

[#3 posted by Schotto , October 11, 2007 12:19 PM]

If I had that kind of money to burn I would so build one of those bad boys. Its all very Island of Dr No.

The article also seems to indicate that Colorado is his locale of choice in the event of some kind of terrible conflict. I wonder if there was any reasoning behind that?

I bet its under the tennis court.