Many times in past installments, I’ve emphasized the importance of doing things discreetly. That’s because anything you do as a fascist is subject to interference by the system. Just because they don’t prosecute moslem rapists or try to police migrant crime doesn’t mean system thugs won’t spend millions of dollars and countless man-hours tracking down people who want to live away from the system, and doubly so if they have politically incorrect opinions.

When it comes to stealth, the gold standard is invisibility. What we really want is for ZOG troops to stand right in front of our base of operations and still fail to find us. This can only be achieved by digging underground and hiding the entrance. The problem, of course, is that conventional underground construction requires heavy machinery, enormous amounts of concrete and masonry units and makes an absolute mess of the area being excavated and built on. Isn’t there a way to create underground spaces without spending a fortune and attracting a lot of attention? In fact, there’s several.

Mike Oehler’s PSP system

In the 70’s, a hardcore hippie named Mike Oehler published a book called “The $50 and up underground house”. He advocated a return to nature, and a method of building houses that made them blend into the environment, which was a good thing because he mostly built them illegally and wanted to avoid attention.

The basic idea of his construction method is to dig a little bit in the earth, then build a wooden frame to keep the dirt from collapsing in on the house, with some polyethylene sheeting to keep the moisture out. The structure is then buried under dirt, keeping the entrance pretty well hidden.

His system is clever, but he had some very different priorities from us, and as such we can make significant improvements on his design in terms of both stealth, durability and performance. But let’s start with an explanation of the original system.

Post, shoring and polyethylene
There are several big problems when trying to build anything underground. First is that the dirt wants to cave in on you. Which, obviously, will really mess up your day. The second problem is that the underground tends to be a damp place, which rots wood and other organic construction materials. This is why underground areas are normally built of stone, concrete or bricks. The third problem is that excavating dirt is a real pain, especially if you’re doing it by hand.

The moisture problem can be solved fairly effectively by the use of polyethylene sheets, also called tarps. These are the blue sheets usually used to cover vehicles and cord wood from the rain and snow. Polyethylene is an absolute moisture barrier and will last for millennia if not exposed to UV rays. So the basic idea is to cover the wall and floor with these tarps, then shore up the wall with wooden planks. The planks are held in place with big wooden beams that are planted in the ground (over poly tarps, of course) and buried. The floor is then covered in either carpets or wooden planks. The roof gets similar treatment.

The site is dug in a hill, with the entrance facing uphill. This makes the entrance (and thus the rest of the house) completely invisible to people who are downhill from it. With some clever design, it can make it very stealthy even from uphill as well, as well as from the air. The problem of excavation is also lessened, since the construction is merely embedded into an existing slope rather than dug out completely from a flat area. The excavated dirt can simply be piled up on the roof and the sides of the house later to completely hide the structure.

Problems
Mike Oehler is a romantic, not a fascist revolutionary. He places more value on aesthetics than on immediate practicality. His design is based on the necessity of having great light, a good view and his abhorrence to concrete. We share none of those prejudices.

While having no windows (relying on led bulbs for illumination) may not be romantic, it sure beats being found out by the system. Ventilation can be managed with a simple convection-operated chimney that can be manually opened and closed as required (more on this concept in a later installment).

Also, while wood is not that expensive, it’s prone to rotting and is very weak. It’s weak because it can only be assembled in rectilinear shapes. The key to making solid underground structures is the “vault” shape, where a round shape is used to support vastly more weight than a straight edge. Thus, if larger structures are to be built in this style, using the wooden shoring method would make them much more vulnerable to collapse from earth pressure.

Potential improvements

Each wall which will be subject to pressure from the surrounding earth should be rounded rather than straight. Of course, this could be easily accomplished using the cob technique, but since cob is vulnerable to moisture, it would be unwise to rely on it for underground construction. The ideal material for this, short of highly skilled vault masonry, would be ferrocement. Ferrocement is cheap and relatively simple to make, and is extraordinarily strong (almost as strong as solid steel!).

Windows should be kept to a minimum, both for heat conservation and stealth considerations. The conventional stove he recommends should be replaced with the high efficiency rocket mass heater covered in an earlier installment. The rocket stove will also be used to power the ventilation system, which is crucial underground to prevent mold.

The floor could be made cheaper by foregoing the wood and the carpeting altogether, and simply compressing the earth with a tamper and soaking in some linseed oil to make it waterproof. Wall to wall carpeting is a nightmare anyway, and a dust and mold accumulator.

Next time…
Oehler’s ideas are a strong basis to build a hidden underground space. He builds cheap, simple, hidden and functional designs. Combined with the many newer ideas floating around in the off-grid building community, you have a lot of potential.

Next time, we’ll take a look at the ultimate in secrecy, the underground tunnel. Most underground designs involve digging a large hole in the ground, building a structure in there and then burying it. How hard would it be to just start digging straight into the side of a hill and carve out a space for yourself?