The family bomb shelter: yay or nay?

During the apocalypse, you’ll have to consider how to protect your family.

This is especially true if you have children. The apocalypse is sure to be filled with chaos (not to mention things exploding and people shooting at each other), and protecting yourself—let alone your family—could be difficult or near impossible.

There will be tough competition for food, water, and shelter, so you’ll have to fight for basic necessities. You’ll probably also meet scary and terrible bad guys who are intent on killing you for being in the way, or eating you because you’re in the way and it happens to be lunchtime.

This doesn’t sound like a very good environment for children, now does it? I thought not.

But how can you guarantee protection and shelter, at least during the apocalypse and in its immediate aftermath? Well, you can’t (sorry). You might, however, have a better chance of having shelter and supplies if you build a bomb shelter and keep it well-stocked. Keep in mind, though, that a bomb shelter would have to be built before an apocalypse—as in, you’d have to start building now.

Only you can really decide if a bomb shelter is worth it for you and your family. Building one is a lot of work, and there’s no guarantee that it will keep you safe.

To help you make your decision, here are some pros and cons.

Pros:

• You have a sure place to go when the apocalypse starts
• You’ll have an initial supply of food, water, and other necessities if you stocked your shelter properly
• You won’t have to worry about where your kids, spouse, and family pets are
• You’ll stay relatively safe during and immediately after the end of the world (well, hopefully)

Cons:

• A bomb shelter will take time and money to build, not to mention a lot of land
• Since it’s hard to predict what kind of apocalypse will be coming, it’s hard to know what kinds of things you’ll really need
• Since you won’t know how long you’ll be in the shelter, it’ll be easy to miscalculate how much you need, and not stock enough of a particular necessity
• A bomb shelter is a confined, finite space—how will you entertain your kids (especially if they’re young kids) after the thirty-eighth day underground? For that matter, how will you keep yourself sane?
• You’ll be at the mercy of whatever’s walking around above ground (remember that other people may find your shelter’s entrance, which will increase your risk of being attacked)
• You’ll be asked to house all sorts of relatives and friends, whether you like them or not, including your in-laws and possibly that guy who tried to flush your head down the toilet in eighth grade (word to the wise: it is NOT okay to feed your mother-in-law to the zombies)
• You can’t stay in there forever. At some point in time, you’ll run out of supplies and/or drive each other crazy. Either way, you’ll have to leave your bomb shelter; will you be prepared for what’s out there?

Ultimately, you’ll have to make the decision yourself. A bomb shelter could come in handy, but you may end up with more headaches in the long run. If you do decide to build one, remember to protect it (and, by extension, your supplies).

You never know when you’ll need it.