I mean, are you talking about rooms that people already own and have installed? Or is this more like physical pentesting for these panic room companies?
I wish there was more substance in this article. Sounds more like the company making a sales pitch. What is the actual increase? Maybe we could at least see a sales trend over the years?
We have a saying in reputation management "Never let a good crisis go to waste", fear and uncertainty can be powerful drivers for drastic actions.
For example, you'll get drastically different responses if you ask someone whether they'd be willing to pay X for a panic room, or how much they're willing to spend to keep their family safe.
Ehh, I'd rather have an environmental catastrophe shelter. 140F outside? Hang out underground with a few months supply of food and water in your environmental bunker. Wildfires? Fireproof yourself and your family with a hyper-nano-pico airfilter in your EnviroBunker(R).
And interestingly, the owners who spoke to Robb Report noted only a handful of times their rooms were ever used in an emergency. The notion of safety, however, is perhaps priceless.
The writer's implied argument can easily be shown to be defective by replacing the referenced object with an analogous one (device used to make bad rare events less bad given they happen):
Interestingly, only a handful of drivers have every actually used their airbags. The notion of safety, however, is perhaps priceless.
"Cheap" isn't absolute, but is relative to your level of wealth. When airbags first hit the market, they were too expensive for most car buyers and, in fact, most cars didn't get them until decades later. Presumably, the people in the article are wealthier than you or I, and they aren't acting irrationally any moreso than the early adopters (relative to the the late adopters) of airbags.
Panic rooms will never get cheap - except in new construction - though.
Unlike cars, houses aren't replaced every 3-10 years. Retrofitting panic rooms will always be expensive - just like retrofitting airbags to a car without them (no one does it).
Similarly, the cost/benefit isn't there to everyone. Every passenger probably has a roughly equal chance of being in an accident, the likelihood that an average person needs a panic room is much lower than the top 0.001% (and probably bottom percentage in the hood would benefit to, but can't afford it, or even giving up the real estate to one, unless it was the primary bedroom).
Airbags were also expensive predominantly because they weren't being installed - and automakers DIDN'T want to install them: https://www.csmonitor.com/1988/0519/abelt.html. I'm not sure cost of production or installation was ever really the significant hurdle to their uptake.
Panic rooms are already cheap for the "rich people" mentioned in the article, which is the point I was making by characterizing "cheapness" as being relative, not absolute, so the analogy holds.
They're probably not worth it for most people. They may have enough utility to make it worth it if they're combined with other purposes (eg tornado cellar made out of block and reinforced door). They don't have to be extremely sophisticated, and they could be relatively cheap if one does it themselves. Sort of like the backyard bunkers during the cold war - they were obtainable for a middle class family if they built it themselves.
Exactly. If I hit the powerball, I might as well buy a bunker, get one of those VIP health screenings, etc. The risks may be low, but the relative cost is inconsequential.
I've experienced four or five, and most people in my inner circle have experienced at least one. Anecdotal only, but I'd contest the claim that "most people will not experience one" at least within places that have mandated airbags in new cars for the last X years.
Ironically, and somewhat supportive of the airbags analogy, none of the accidents I had were in cars that had airbags, or those that were, the airbags didn't / needn't deploy. There was one, however, where seatbelts were critical.
77% of drivers have been in at least one accident. Your chances of getting into a car accident during a 1,000-mile trip are 1 in 366.
The average driver will file an insurance claim for an auto collision once every 17.9 years. This means that if you obtain your driver’s license at age 16, you will likely have a crash by the time you are 34. This means the average person has 3-4 vehicle accidents over the course of their lifetime
Also, car accidents are effectively instantaneous, then you're usually either dead or en route to a hospital within some exponentially distributed period of time.
Societal collapse can last anywhere from a week, in the event of a hurricane, to decades. Living self-sustained in relative comfort for a week is difficult, doing it for a month is much more difficult, and longer time periods approach impossibility very quickly.
The basic fallacy in the writer's argument is that your odds of being prepared for a societal collapse are astronomically higher than your odds of needing an air bag.
The difference is distribution.
With apocalyptic events (pandemic, war, coup, hurricane, etc.), 100% of the population is affected in any given region perhaps every 50-200 years on average.
With serious car accidents, a fraction of a percent of the population is affected every day.
We don't tend to prepare well for rare events (like wars, famines, plaques, etc.). We do for frequent low-probability ones. Indeed, we're probably most worried about things rare enough to make the news (like school shootings), as unlikely as they are.
Panic rooms are all about being attacked in your own home. A general collapse of society isn’t required to use them.
Even in the safest countries, you will still have a small percentage of home invasions, kidnappings, and burglaries. That’s why people have locked doors, alarm systems, barred windows, guard dogs, actual guards, electrified fences, and finally panic rooms if all of the above fails.
Just for the record, history shows crises show up in even the safest countries. Some of these are slow and creeping, and some are rapid and sudden. On the other hand, if history is any indicator, you have maybe a 1/4 chance of having some regional, national, or global crisis situation hit during your lifetime. Many of those don't require a panic room, admittedly.
My odds of being unsafe in my home under normal circumstances are small. I'm not going to argue that if you have a billion dollars, you shouldn't get a panic room. Kidnapping a billionaire is much more worthwhile than a normal bloke, and I have no idea what the risk are. For most people, though, the odds are very low.
If I were rational, at my economic level, I'd have food stashed away, a few guns, medical supplies, and similar. However, I'm lazy. It's like backups. It's a good idea, but....
Richer people might have more, and poor people might have less. I've read about safety plans for rich people, and they're interesting. If you've got a few billion dollars, dropping a million or even a few million on a crisis plan is completely rational. Poor people, on the other hand, can't afford something like food+medicine stashed away (especially since they need to be rotated with expiration).
I have to wonder if spending the cost of the safe room on better pay/working conditions for your employees might buy you more safety. Home invasions are pretty rare, but workplace shootings are quite common and have a higher death rate.
I did several tours underwater on a submarine. People ask me if it was scary but I never felt safer in my life, hidden away somewhere in the Atlantic cruising 400 ft underwater for months at a time.
On the topic of panic rooms in general, it is probably more practical to turn your bedroom into a panic room by having a reinforced door frame and solid door. And possibly either less-breakable windows, or window shutters that can be automatically closed on command. Then have attic access through your closet ceiling, using a set of shelves as a ladder.
My thinking is that if a break in happens when you are sleeping then you won't have to worry about needing to move to the panic room. And you don't have a panic room taking up space in your residence. The bedroom door and shutters could be set to automatically close & lock when your house alarm is tripped (and if you aren't in your bedroom at the time you can access it via a code or fingerprint swipe).
Also, a basic panic room could be set up fairly inexpensively which is useful in case of a no-knock SWAT that got the wrong house. Gives you time to wake up, react, head to the attic and hide out until the situation calms a bit. (I wonder if a SWAT response team would know to check the attic, esp. if the closet ceiling is disguised and reinforcably lockable from the attic side).
Fair point, but I was just thinking of a way to buy some time. Thinking of cases where a tactical entry (to a wrong residence) startled the resident while they were sleeping, and the startled reaction lead to a bad outcome (multiple stories recently on this).
In a perfect world, I'd like to see a setup where when there is police error, the target can still be protected from a panic shooting while still demonstrating that they are not a threat. The other option is to buy enough time to scramble to the attic, then scramble over to a shaft that gets you down into a wall cavity with access to a better hiding spot or an outside escape.
> In a perfect world, I'd like to see a setup where when there is police error, the target can still be protected from a panic shooting while still demonstrating that they are not a threat. The other option is to buy enough time to scramble to the attic, then scramble over to a shaft that gets you down into a wall cavity with access to a better hiding spot or an outside escape.
You’re drastically overthinking this. There’s no way to make sure this is only sold to people who are the accidental targets of tactical entry.
Just ban no-knock warrants — especially ones in the dead of night.
In a house with drywall interior walls over wooden or metal studs, a framing hammer will make a reinforced door completely irrelevant. Somebody that wants to get to you can just come through the wall in a few seconds.
This also depends on how much wall space is in common between the bedroom and other parts of the house. In a previous house I lived in, the door was at the top of the stairs, and you would need a ladder / scaffolding to get to the part of the wall that was facing the stairwell. In that case there would be fairly little wall to reinforce with extra studs. Basically, wall studs are 16 inches apart on center (so a 14.5 inch gap between studs), so you would at most have to double the number of studs to have a somewhat less vulnerable room. Or, if retrofitting, several 3/4 inch plywood sheets screwed onto the vulnerable wall section, with decorative paneling covering them, may also be somewhat effective.
Also remember that the object is to buy time. And most threats wont be a tactical threat, but from a random break in from someone that doesn't know much of what they are doing (but will know enough to panic shoot an occupant when they see one).
Nothing you can buy is going to protect you from a Spetsnatz team that is kidnapping you out of your home to stuff into a duffle bag marked 'Diplomatic mail'.
But if you in your suburban home are so incredibly paranoid about getting burgled, a heavy bedroom door with a lock will provide you 99% of the protection for 1% of the price.
And, unlike a gun and an itchy trigger finger is incredibly unlikely to kill or maim you, a family member, or an innocent bystander.
> Nothing you can buy is going to protect you from a Spetsnatz team that is kidnapping you out of your home to stuff into a duffle bag marked 'Diplomatic mail'.
My understanding is that this is precisely what some of the high-end panic rooms (notably the subterranean form) promise.
And my understanding is that anyone who believes that promise is a fool, because they'll just stuff you into that duffle bag when you step out in your pajamas at 7 am to pick up the Tuesday morning paper. Or jab you with a ricin-laden umbrella. Or put polonium in your tea, and hold a press conference where they say they totally didn't do it, with the periodic table of elements as a backdrop.
That's all true. But you clearly indicated "kidnapping you out of your home", and I suspect there are indeed panic rooms you can buy that will prevent that (even if they clearly cannot prevent the above scenarios).
"...it is probably more practical to turn your bedroom into a panic room..."
It's not really practical to turn any room into a true panic room. Panic rooms are made to be very robust, so you can essentially wait out the threat. Sure, stuff like laminating windows and having strong doors/frames can be good. It's only going to buy you limited time. You could have a disguised hiding spot, like in the attic, but I don't know that it really meets the definition of panic room. Yes, SWAT will check the attic (eventually). And my guess is that if you're worried about being accidentally labeled a threat and shot, that they will be more likely to label someone hiding in the attic as resisting. Although, maybe you can call 911 and they could instruct you how to safely surrender.
Your comment about the weakness of doors is on point. I expect a burglar to break my door in a few seconds despite the relative sturdiness.
What protects me is the city I live in, the neighbors and statistics.
This is also why I want to have an electronic lock. Everyone is yelling me how I will get hacked and I wipe move to get hacked instead of someone destroying my door.
Same reason I bought a bunch of MREs and peanut butter when the pandemic started — I wanted to give myself the feeling that I was in control of my life.
How does one quickly and effectively collect their children and move them into a panic room? Is there enough warning for situations that warrant a panic room?
Honestly I classify "panic rooms" as "very dumb ideas" of the same kind we see in movies, where people "flee to the roof" (of course without any chopper or something else to escape from it) or try to protect themselves form shooting using fridge doors and sofas.
The LAST thing to do is self-trapping themselves while an assaulter have plenty of time to acquire anything to act against you.
Beside that, not being "rich" but definitively wealthy I choose to flee a big city for a mountain area, hydro-geologically stable, with enough services, not too remote, but still not "sub-urban" or "urban", just because seeing the public parts of Green New Deal, New Urban Agenda etc I realize that in the near future from skyrocketing unrest to cities more and more similar to modern Chinese "Model Cities" that's a needed move to preserve a bit of freedom still not becoming an eremite.
I do that few years before covid and covid itself prove the good aim, here I'm not in a castle, nor a bunker, nor something apt for military defenses BUT I have room for domestic p.v. with storage, freezers, fridge, ... to be not really autonomous but at least have reasonable "buffers" for pretty anything (water, food, energy, a bit of redundant 'devices' etc) enough to suffer less from potential future unreliable services and sporadic scarcity, if both will not happen I'm still shielded from price rises, anything will be paid back even if in a not so little time. Doing more is complicated, I'm an IT guy not a farmer and becoming a farmer is not much interested economically compared to IT nor much easy in the present and probably near-future conditions. In any case autarchy is a bit utopia since I can't produce anything I use at home without evolving toward a small nation-State with enough resources to have enough nukes to protect myself so...
Long story short I think articles about panic-rooms, emigration to NZ etc are more PR than something else. Especially in the terms they narrate.
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