NEW YORK - July 29, 2010 - Jason Hodge, father of four children from Barstow, Kalifornia, says he's not paranoid but is concerned, and that's why he bought space in what might be labeled a doomsday shelter.

Hodge bought into the first of a proposed nationwide group of 20 fortified, underground shelters - the Vivos shelter network - that are intended to protect those inside for up to a year from catastrophes such as a nuclear attack, killer asteroids or tsunamis, according to the project's developers.

"It's an investment in life," says Hodge, a Teamsters union representative. "I want to make sure I have a place I can take my family (and me) if that worst-case scenario were to happen."

There are signs that underground shelters, almost-forgotten relics of the Cold War era, are making a comeback.
The Vivos network, which offers partial ownerships similar to a timeshare in underground shelter communities, is one of several ventures touting escape from a surface-level calamity.

Radius Engineering in Terrell, Texas, has built underground shelters for more than three decades, and business has never been better, says Walton McCarthy, company president.

The company sells fiberglass shelters that can accommodate 10 to 2,000 adults to live underground for one to five years with power, food, water and filtered air, McCarthy says.

The shelters range from $400,000 to a $41 million facility Radius built and installed underground that is suitable for 750 people, McCarthy says. He declined to disclose the client or location of the shelter.

"We've doubled sales every year for five years," he says. Other shelter manufacturers include Hardened Structures of Colorado and Utah Shelter Systems, which also report increased sales.

The shelters have their critics. Ken Rose, a history professor at California State University-Chico and author of One Nation Underground: The Fallout Shelter in American Culture, says underground shelters were a bad idea a half-century ago and they're a bad idea now. "A terrorist with a nuke in a suitcase pales in comparison to what the Cold War had to offer in the 1950s and '60s, which was the potential annihilation of the human race," he says.