Builders: Bomb shelter business booming

North Korea tensions fuel fear, sales

Tensions between North Korea and the United States are stirring memories of the Cold War and inspiring fear-fueled home improvements: bomb shelters.

Building backyard bomb shelters caught on amid the missile crisis of 1962, when the Soviet Union brought nuclear-tipped missiles to Cuba and aimed them at the U.S., The Telegraph reported. The threat of nuclear war loomed for two weeks as President John F. Kennedy and Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev faced off.

Builders say shelters are making a comeback.

"When Trump took office, it doubled our sales, and then when he started making crazy statements, we got a lot more orders," Walton McCarthy of Norad Shelter Systems LLC in Garland, Texas, told The Telegraph. "Between now and a year ago, we've quadrupled our sales."

Atlas Survival Shelters, McCarthy's California-based competitor, sold 30 shelters in three days last week, The Telegraph reported. In 2011, its first year of business, the company sold a total of 10.

At Rising S Company the last month, business has been booming, WFAA reported. The Texas business is currently building 40 underground bunkers, and has 80 more in the works.

"Ninety-nine percent are calling and they are worried about North Korea," Gary Lynch of Rising S Company told WFAA. 

Lynch said bunkers cost $45,000 and up. Clients' requests have included the usual, such as kitchens, family rooms, and bedrooms, and the extravagant: swimming pools, gun ranges and even horse stables.