Shipping containers are now such a thing that in Denmark, they are putting them in glass cases. I have had a troubled relationship with shipping containers since I was ten, when my dad went into the container biz. They were made in the USA and Canada then and were really expensive; you wouldn't think of living in them. But every now and again he would get sent a photo of some shipping container in Africa that fell off a truck and had windows and doors cut into the walls.
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Lloyd Alter
I had some fun with them in University, designing a summer camp for temporary use that folded out of a forty footer. Because you would never actually use a container empty; the dimensions are lousy for people and the flooring was treated with insecticides and the paints were designed to last through ten years on the high seas, so are seriously industrial. It may have been a really bad career choice not sticking with containers, but my moves into modular construction and tiny homes were not too successful either.
The Issue With Shipping Container Housing
Perhaps the lesson is that when it comes to housing, technology, or lack thereof, is not the fundamental problem. After watching all the coverage of shipping container schemes with some bemusement, I asked Does Shipping Container Architecture Make Sense? But now, in response to an architectural competition, Architect Mark Hogan of OpenScope Studio comes up with his own list of questions.
He speaks from some experience, having actually built a container project, and notes that "For sites where on-site construction is not feasible or desirable, fitting a container out in the factory can be a sensible option." But for housing? On his personal website, Mark makes some very good points. Here are some of the most interesting.
Shipping Containers Have Structural Problems
Housing is usually not a technology problem. All parts of the world have vernacular housing, and it usually works quite well for the local climate. There are certainly places with material shortages, or situations where factory built housing might be appropriate- especially when an area is recovering from a disaster. In this case prefab buildings would make sense- but doing them in containers does not.
Here I might argue that the great genius of shipping containers is not the box but the handling systems; there are ships, cranes, trucks and trains all designed around them. So if you do want to deliver stuff fast after a disaster, there is no better form than the shipping container. He then goes through the fundamental problem of width, which is just too narrow really, Insulation, which is a huge problem, and for once, somebody understands about structure:
Ganti & Associates
You&#;ve seen the proposals with cantilevers everywhere. Containers stacked like Lego building blocks, or with one layer perpendicular to the next. Architects love stuff like this, just like they throw around usually misleading/meaningless phrases like &#;kit of parts.&#; Guess what- the second you don&#;t stack the containers on their corners, the structure that is built into the containers needs to be duplicated with heavy steel reinforcing. The rails at the top and the roof of the container are not structural at all (the roof of a container is light gauge steel, and will dent easily if you step on it). If you cut openings in the container walls, the entire structure starts to deflect and needs to be reinforced because the corrugated sides act like the flange of beam and once big pieces are removed, the beam stops working. All of this steel reinforcing is very expensive, and it&#;s the only way you can build a &#;double-wide.&#;
They Present Challenges for Utilities
And then there is one that I have never thought about but is important:
In a large building, you&#;ll still need a lot of space to run utilities. Because of the problems with insulation mentioned above, you will need to install a very robust HVAC system to heat and cool the building (that Mumbai tower shown above would literally be a deathtrap without cooling). You will have a hard time taking advantage of passive strategies like thermal mass if you maintain the container aesthetic. You&#;ll also end up with low ceilings, as even high cube containers are only 9-&#;6&#; (2.9 m) in overall exterior height, so any ductwork or utilities start cutting in to headroom.
OpenScope Studio
They Waste Space
Finally Mark mentions the issue of recycling. I have looked at this in the past, with the Upcycle House which had " the ambitious goal of being the first house build only from upcycled and environmentally sustainable materials." I did a calculation to determine if using two shipping containers as the structure of the house was actually the highest and best use:
An empty 40' shipping container weighs pounds. A galvanized steel stud weighs a pound per linear foot. These two containers, melted down and rolled and formed, could have been upcycled into 2,095 8' long steel studs. Framing the walls instead of using shipping containers would have used about 144 of them. Using shipping containers as structural elements for a one storey building is downcycling and wasting of a resource.
There is a lot more steel in a shipping container than you actually need for a building; that's so they can be stacked full nine high and get tossed around the ocean and thrown on trucks and trains. It's really being wasted when it's put into a house. And as Mark notes, you can probably build it faster and cheaper than bringing in a welder and mucking up a shipping container.
Relatively untrained people can build a room that size of simple wood framing in a day without needing to rent a crane or learning how to weld for about the same cost (or less) than buying a used container.
Shipping Containers Don't Make Good Homes
Don't get me wrong; I love shipping container architecture that moves, plugs in, that takes advantage of the tremendous infrastructure. I agree with Mark that it is terrific for temporary or emergency uses. But does it make good housing? I don't think so. Perhaps after all these years I am still missing something.
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I bet you were thinking that I was about to give you plans about how you should dig a hole for a cheap underground bunker with a door to be used for a simple SHTF/TEOTWAWKI survival bunker. Well, you&#;re wrong. What I&#;m here to tell you is that if you listen to pretty much all of the crap advice on the web, that you&#;ll be wrong again.
Shipping containers were built to be stacked. They&#;re called Intermodal Freight Containers because they can be moved on trains, boats, helicopters, whatever. They are meant to be large portable closets. They were not to be buried or cut into, and certainly weren&#;t designed to be used as underground bunkers. Once you do that, you start changing their effectiveness. They are not built for lateral pressure and not designed for long-term wetness or acidic/caustic soil.
If you really want to know how to build a shelter, check out this book.
I spent quite a lot of time in Iraq and saw some of the buried shelters that were only underground partway, and they were all buckling under the pressure. Guarantee they aren&#;t still safe even today. Not saying that you CAN&#;T bury a shipping container as an underground SHTF bunker if you do your homework and spend a lot of extra money and effort supporting it but you CAN&#;T just bury one in the ground at any appreciable depth without some supporting engineering and there are other considerations above even that. Just for reference, a cubic yard of dirt weighs somewhere between a ton and pounds or so. Imagine how much pressure a buried container bunker must have to withstand and then realize that the whole thing is surrounded by metal that&#;s only about as thick as a saw blade.
Now imagine if it rains. Now imagine if someone drives a truck or even just walks over your supposedly-hidden bunker? Also consider that you have to add in some safety margin just for shits and giggles plus to compensate for the materials aging over time. If you&#;ve never studied mechanical engineering, you need to understand that something that can withstand a LOT of pressure on one angle won&#;t necessarily withstand even close to that pressure at another.
Think about an egg. If you push down from the top of an egg, it&#;ll hold up to a lot more pressure than you&#;d think. Press it on the sides though and it crushes before you even start pushing. Same thing for a beer can. You can stand on one with no problem but then push your finger into one of the sides and the whole thing crushes. That&#;s because the force pushes down on itself, which is why shipping containers can hold a lot of weight if they&#;re stacked. These containers are designed to hold a LOT of weight as long as it&#;s held in the right spots, but anywhere else and you might as well just bury an enclosed car trailer. Take a look at what happened with this container that ended up being sent to auction.
Why? It&#;s physics, baby! Go to college and learn why. I&#;m just here to tell you that it happens, even though you may not have heard about it. Start vetting your sources before you listen to them and you&#;ll start seeing a pattern, and then you&#;ll start seeing which stories are true and which are just fluff to get you to click on their links.
What are you trying to accomplish? Sure, you can get a shipping container for a few thousand dollars. Those few thousand dollars buy you a very small room. A room that I&#;ve lived in for many, many, many months overseas on different deployments. They&#;re called Containerized Living Units (CLU&#;s) or Containerized Housing Units (CHU&#;s). I used them just to sleep in, along with anywhere from one to three roommates and I gotta tell you, it&#;s not fun. I couldn&#;t imagine being stuck in one of them with other people for months at a time.
A shipping container is pretty much a rectangular metal tent. Imagine living in an underground bunker for months before coming up. If you&#;ve never spent weeks living out of a tent at night, you have no idea what it&#;d be like living in a bunker for months, both day and night.
That&#;s not even counting the actual logistics of not leaving the container, including human waste, trash, emotional pressure and the actual tactics involved. I&#;ll be visiting the tactical idiocy of almost all underground bunkers I&#;ve seen in a later post but if you just think about things from the enemy&#;s viewpoint and how they&#;d attack you, you&#;ll either quickly see how stupid it is or you really need to just go ahead and do it now so you&#;re out of the gene pool before you procreate. If you&#;ve ever been in combat in an urban environment, you know just how shitty of a decision it is to hole up in a room with only one entrance. One entrance means one exit. If they control the entrance, they control the exit, and they have a lot more room and supplies outside than you could have in a bunker. No matter how fortified your structure is, unless you spend a CRAPLOAD of money, all they have to do is wait you out and can easily speed up your schedule to come out.
Now I&#;m not saying that you shouldn&#;t consider fortified underground bunkers at all, but if you do, just realize that you&#;ve shut out a lot of your capabilities such as escape, resupply and support if you don&#;t make a pretty extensive plan. They&#;re great for storm shelters but not so much for defense, although I&#;d go with a cement storm shelter anyway (just be careful on storm shelters that your entranceway is tested to see that it can take high-speed debris damage or you&#;ll be essentially sitting in your shelter watching the storm rearrange your furniture).
Not to mention the fact that shipping containers are prone to have toxic paint and chemicals in the wood, including fumigation sprays that will likely require you to replace all the wood and strip all the paint to be safe.
Enough of that for now though because there are ways to plan around these problems but I wanted to mention them because people who are drawn to burying shipping container bunkers are the same idiots who&#;ll not consider what I&#;ve mentioned already, let alone the tactical disadvantage of being buried in a box a few feet below the surface with limited air supply and exits. I may go into the tactical ways to design and protect an underground bunker in a later thing but at the moment, I just want you to realize that if you&#;re going by what you&#;ve most likely been reading in some pretty popular articles about burying shipping containers, that you&#;re probably wrong.
The plain and simple truth is that a shipping container is designed to be stacked and have pretty much zero horizontal external pressure. Burying it will add a LOT of side pressure, especially if you&#;re in a rain-prone environment or have certain soils. They&#;re just not built for that. Might as well just build a frame and fill it with cement in the walls for a lot cheaper.
Here&#;s another example from Texas. It was placed above ground because they weren&#;t too far above sea level. This is after about 10 years:
The biggest lesson you need to learn is that if you&#;re gonna build an underground shelter, you need to have someone who does this kind of thing for a living come in and take it all into consideration. If you have electricity running through it, have an electrician check it all out. If you bury it, make sure that you&#;ve supported it with will withstand rain for many years, not just as soon as you&#;re done burying it. Why on Earth would you try to save a few hundred bucks to risk it caving in on your family or electrocuting your kid to death during the first rainstorm? Are you a really a prepper?
If you&#;re gonna use a shipping container bunker as an underground shelter, realize that it&#;s most likely made out of Corten Steel. Pretty decent stuff as long as it doesn&#;t get scratched and dented. If it does, it&#;ll start rusting through. Not a good thing if you&#;re 10 feet underground. They are pretty cheap and have their place in your plans if you&#;re smart. Here&#;s an example of one I found on Amazon for about $:
As long as it&#;s sealed, you can make it useable if you spend some time reinforcing the walls, depending on the soil and rainfall in the area. Just make sure that you don&#;t bury a 9-ish foot container under 6 feet of earth in an area that has a water table 12 feet under the ground. If you want to see some common specifications of shipping containers, check out this wikipedia article.
Basically, a shipping container is pretty good for above-ground fortification as long as you fix any chemical problem. You can decide to bury one (or more) but to do it properly (not even counting the tactics and other considerations), you&#;ll have to spend a lot more money to make it right than just buying and delivering the containers.
Remember though, just because it&#;s metal doesn&#;t make it bullet-proof (one big advantage to an underground bunker) Don&#;t take my word for it, do some research specifically looking at the limitations and dangers of burying shipping containers for yourself instead of just looking at the cost savings. Structurally, pipes are MUCH better at withstanding pressure, from any direction. The problem is that they&#;re round and we like our stuff to be on flat floors with flat walls. If, however, you could put a rectangular shipping container into a cylindrical pipe underground, you&#;d be set structurally. You&#;d still have to deal with the fact that you&#;re buried underground though. Here&#;s a video of an example of one made out of metal:
Think it through. Have someone come take a look at your plans before you commit. Don&#;t be an idiot. A shipping container is a great starting point for an above-ground shelter or if you&#;re planning on adding a supporting structure to it (provided you&#;ve figured out all the tactics of being stuck in a hole in the ground with people who might want to get you out). It just might not be the cheapest way to go if you&#;re planning on burying it.
The biggest thing though is that if you&#;re trying to use it, or anything else, as a buried defensive bunker, you&#;d better have a hidden exit somewhere to get out if you&#;re found, and should be thinking about some serious camouflage around it for your entrance and vents. It would suck to spend all that money, planning, and time just to make yourself a ridiculously overly-complicated coffin. Underground shipping container bunkers are possible; just don&#;t think that all you have to do is dig a deep hole, drop a shipping container into it, bury it and decorate.
If you really want an underground bunker and you want to do it the right way, you should be talking to someone like Vivos Shelters or or someone else that has a lot of experience and references. Nothing says you can&#;t do all the research yourself but the point of a shelter is to keep you safe. It would kind of suck if your shelter were the very thing that got you hurt.
If you&#;re still considering building your own underground shelter, at least check out The Bomb Shelter Builders Book and get a good base of what to do, or even better, check out this page that has plans you can download to build one.
Why you shouldn&#;t bury shipping containers for bunkers
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