Ready For Doomsday? Underground Shelters Going Fast!

Freaking out about the end of the world in 2012? Well, you can extend your time on earth by parting ways with $50,000 and get in on some underground bunker space underneath the Mojave Desert. If spending a year underneath Barstow sounds like your idea of a good time, here's the guy to talk to.

What would you do to keep your family safe?

Robert Vicino is betting enough of us are willing to spend $50,000 a person — half-price for children — to buy a stake in secret underground shelters.

The Del Mar time-share entrepreneur said he wants to give average citizens an affordable way to survive everything from colossal storms to Armageddon. He envisions a network of 20 concrete-and-steel communal shelters across the U.S.

“We’re offering you a quality real estate product: prebuilt, prefortified, prestocked,” Vicino said. “It will withstand any threat that mankind, nature or the divine will throw at us.”

For some, Vicino’s Vivos project awakens memories of Cold War backyard fallout shelters, but these 21st-century bunkers would be 35 feet below ground and equipped with air- and water-purification systems; enough freeze-dried lasagna and other food for a year; and board games, books and DVDs to pass the time.

Vicino is close to retrofitting an old shelter in Barstow — the first in the network — and others would be built with his patented modular construction techniques.

Vicino is not necessarily a subscriber to a doomsday scenario, and his company has no religious affiliation. He said that many people fear cataclysmic disasters and that he is fulfilling a market need.

“Millions of people believe that we are living in the ‘end times,’ ” says the project’s website, terravivos.com. “Eventually, our planet will realize another devastating catastrophe, whether man-made, or a cyclical force of nature. Disasters are rare and unexpected, but on any sort of long timeline, they’re inevitable. It’s time to prepare!”

The Vivos website has a clock that counts down to Dec. 21, 2012 — the date on which some believe the Mayan and Hopi cultures predicted the world would end.

Vicino said he’s not fanning the flames of fear and notes that disaster preparedness is being embraced by wealthy celebrities such as Tom Cruise, who built a $10 million shelter for 10 in Colorado.

San Pedro resident Steve Kramer, 55, decided to buy into the Barstow project after his 12-year-old son came home from school frightened about rumors that the world would end in 2012. The boy found the Vivos site on the Internet.

“I just felt it was a good value,” said Kramer, a respiratory therapist. “It gave my family a lot of security.”

Come January 1, 2013, this guy will have a fat bank account and a barrel full of laughs.