Security and Situational Awareness Systems
The first rule of privately owning a hardened shelter is to not let others know you have one. The reason is simple, when people are seeking protection from an eminent threat and/or safety following a post apocalyptic type event, those desperate souls would go to your shelter seeking safety and take over your shelter, and/or kill you, if that is required to secure their own safety.
As civil unrest, violent riots, and/or the collapse of society unfolds, protecting your family becomes the first priority. Blackstone Hardened Shelters provides you with the ability to shelter in a safe place that could be your entire home/building or a portion of it. Once inside a secure shelter, the question then remains - what’s the situation outside the shelter? Having situational awareness of the outside threat environment protects who and what is inside the shelter. Knowledge of the outside threat environment provides shelter occupants with the ability to prepare to defend, survive, and know when it is safe to exit the shelter.
In the days before computers, submarine periscopes were installed in nuclear bomb proof bunkers / hardened shelters as the only means of providing a view to the outside world to ascertain the existential threat situation. Today, advanced electronic communication and surveillance technology can provide shelter occupants with a real time view to the shelter exterior surroundings and global situation.
Every Blackstone Hardened Shelter project has different situational awareness and communication requirements. Access and control of occupied or unoccupied shelters can be managed by a wrist watch, mobile (cell) phone, laptop computer, and/or on/off-site security monitoring personnel. The types of cameras available provide a wide variety of technology from visual to infrared with variable optical ranges, sensors, and with or without audio capabilities.
Other security measures include passive and active systems. Passive systems include proper siting of a shelter to take advantage of the natural terrain to hinder movement towards a shelter. We provide strategic site planning services to locate a hardened shelter in the most defensible position and to conceal utility services from adversaries. The first shelter defense design rule is to eliminate an attacker’s access by vehicle to a shelter by forcing them to approach on foot thus increasing the defensive posture of a shelter. A second shelter defense design rule is to design a shelter that prevents an attacker from gaining access above ground level thus limiting options for direct access to fortified openings such as hardened doors and windows. In this respect, we look back to the early fortress and castle designs where fortification designs from those early structures are applicable today. Other passive security measures include removal of trees and shrubs close to a shelter to leave assailants exposed in the open, high security door locks, ground sensors, alarms, lights, barrier gates, and other physical obstructions to hinder movement towards a shelter without providing cover for an attacker to acquire a protected firing position.
Active security measures include hand held weapons of various sorts facilitated by optimum shooting positions built into the shelter, gas systems, and a host of other entrapment and kill system options. The use of active protection systems to protect shelter occupants requires training and may have legal implications in certain jurisdictions for which we offer no legal advice and bear no responsibility. We can connect you retired Tier 1 elite special operations soldiers (SEALS, Delta, CIA, etc.) providing training in arms and self-defense tactics. Please contact us to discuss active systems.
