"We hope to have 20 facilities done by 2012," he said. At $50,000 per person, and long before it's even done, the shelter is already almost sold out.Vicino is nearing completion on another shelter in Indiana that will be big enough to house 80 people.
It will be fortified against the unthinkable, he said, complete with a hospital and a movie theater. "It's Noah's Ark," Vicino said at the time. Last year, "Nightline" profiled Robert Vicino, a real estate agent in the process of converting a Cold War bunker in the Mojave desert into a luxury modern shelter with several condo units for sale. Harold Camping, the president of Family Radio, a California-based Christian radio broadcast, proclaimed that Doomsday was upon us first back in 1988, then in 1994 and then most recently for May 21, 2011, all of which came and when without so much as a frog falling from the sky.īut there are enough people believing the end is nigh that few have been able to turn Doomsday into an entrepreneurial business opportunity. "I'm preparing for a black swan event like a catastrophic new Madrid earthquake," she said. There's also a New England mom, Kathy Harrison, who calls herself the Doris Day of Doom. Other participants include a couple from Texas who live off the grid, filter their own water, have a stockpile of canned goods to feed 22 people for years and have converted school buses into getaway vehicles. Ralston is just one of several people featured on National Geographic's upcoming series, " Doomsday Preppers," which premieres on Tuesday, Feb. God put you on this Earth for certain things, and for me it's to make sure my family lives and I can help other people." "I have a lot of other religious friends that say, 'I don't want to prepare, I'll just go to heaven.' And I say, 'Well, do you know what it's like to starve to death?' It's not a pleasant thing. Eventually, Ralston said he plans to use a converted shipping container to build an underground shelter in the desert, filled with everything they would need to survive. Once a week, Ralston takes his two sons out into the Arizona desert about 30 minutes away from their Scottsdale home for a Doomsday dress rehearsal. "But in reality, the more information I started to give to her, it opened up her eyes to the other potential threats that are out there." "In the beginning, my wife really wasn't on the same page as I was," Ralston said. Inside is a trailer, which he keeps packed and ready to go at all times, stockpiles of freeze-dried food, including cartons of canned chicken with a shelf life of 15 years, survival gear, such as a system for purifying polluted water, first aid kits and lots of weapons and ammunition. Ralston turned his family's two-car garage into a staging area.
You have car insurance, health insurance, life insurance."Ĭall it Apocalypse insurance. "For me, I look at prepping as kind of like insurance. "There's a lot of different things that could happen," Ralston said. Tim Ralston, a married father of two from Arizona, is one such "prepper." 6, 2012 - The never-ending hysteria over a Doomsday cometh has sparked a growing movement of people called "preppers," who prepare for the end of the world as we know it - and in some cases, make a profit.