40 feet underground lays an old missile silo in Roswell with a lot of history. It’s a home where you don’t have to worry about curb appeal.
All you can see from above ground is a door to the stairwell. From there, it’s straight down four stories in pitch black.
“If the lights happened to go out, you can’t see anything beyond your nose,” said Tom Edgett.
Once at the bottom, there’s a series of tunnels. Then, it finally opens up into a big room – an underground cave.
Its my understanding that these things are, in the unfinished stages, a mass of stagnant water, toxic byproducts, and endless hours of repair and restoration….but there is still something just really, really cool about them. How cool would it be to have your quaint and cozy ‘tiny house’ of 200 square feet and trapdoor in the floor leading to your zillion square foot basement?
But, yeah, unless its already been done for you, turning it into habitable space is gonna be an adventure.
There are actually several in the country that have been ‘redone’ into deluxe apartments. Some developer, in Missouri, I think, turned one into a survivalist paradise, where the well-heeled can plunk down large sums for a place to survive the apocalypse, complete with decontamination stations, hydroponic growing and a tilapia farm in the basement. And troops guarding the compound. That one was featured on some homes show. Others occasionally crop up in real estate ads. There was a DIYer silo project that is for sale in the southwest somewhere; the guy died of old age before he got very far on it.
Yeah…you definitely are not moving right in if you purchase these.
Yeah, I love looking at pictures and videos of finished ones, dreaming of having something like that…. But… if you worked around the clock for a lifetime, you’d still never fix that up on your own. In reality, you’d have to spend a million+ to hire entire crews to pump out the watter, gut the rotten stuff, re-wire it for electricity, paint it, air it out, fix/maintain sump-pumps, blah-blah-blah.
I wonder what the RADON levels are, at 10 stories under the ground….
It takes a lot of money to be crazy.
Great point about radon. I’m not sure what average radon levels are like in New Mexico. In my home state, the radiation from the unmitigated radon in a silo like this would likely kill you faster than the radioactive fallout you’re trying to avoid.