People, y’all. We’re wild.

Sometimes our big ideas turn into amazing things that literally change the world.

Other times…they destroy our homes and all of our dreams for the future.

Everyone knew burying an old water tower as a bunker was a bad idea.

Find out what happened and how everyone was proven right.

Bury an old water tower to use as an emergency shelter? Sure, what could go wrong with that.

So this actually happened to my dad a few years ago. He lived in an area right along the Texas/Oklahoma border in fairly rural area.

My dad primarily worked in pipeline construction. One day my dad noticed someone had purchased a very large property not too far down the road.

Turns out, that the new neighbor was actually from the suburbs around Columbus, Ohio and had just won a lottery prize.

The man hadn’t won the jackpot but had won a smaller prize around $2 million.

My dad was also originally from Ohio so he decided to say hello.

The man was a self-confessed prepper, which wasn’t all that strange.

A few days later he meets the lotto neighbor, we’ll call him Jim.

Jim starts telling my dad about his dream to build his own self sustaining homestead far away from the rest of society. Jim was very interested in prepping and convinced of a soon to come global societal collapse.

He used his lotto winning to purchase the land and begin building his homestead.

My dad honestly didn’t find this that odd because many people in the area had some tendency toward independence and those prepping shows were popular at the time.

Then, he came to him with a truly wild idea.

About a year later, Jim reached out to my dad to ask for help with a construction project that involves burying a large water tower in the ground.

My dad is a little confused but decided to go take a look.

Turns out Jim bought an old water tower (about 15 ft in diameter and about 15 high) for the purpose of reusing it as an underground shelter.

Jim had recently completed the build of a prefab home on his property and wanted the water tower buried partially under the new home with a trap door built in a closet to access it.

His dad told him it was dumb but he didn’t want to hear it.

My dad immediately thought this was the dumbest thing he’d ever heard and proceeded to tell Jim all the potential issues with his plan.

Jim cut him off and told my dad that his contractor for the home had basically told him the same and so had several others he’d contacted to try get get them to bury this water tower.

However, Jim believed this was simply laziness on their part and had the utmost confidence in his plan.

My dad left but a day or so later Jim contacts him again and asks about paying my dad to let him rent some construction equipment he had on his own property.

My dad again goes over with him what a bad idea this is and how no legitimate crew would ever do this for him.

So, when he said he was going ahead, the guy’s dad sent a crew his way who needed the cash.

Jim brings up using my dad’s equipment and illegal laborers.

My dad decides well if he’s determined, might as well make a few bucks off lotto winner Jim.

He quotes him some ridiculous price to rent his equipment and says he can ask a guy at work he knows about gathering up a group of Mexican day laborers.

Jim agrees to the crazy price and my dad gets in touch with a Mexican friend who had a crew of day laborers.

The guy treated them terribly, but the money was good.

A bit later my dad asks his friend about how the project is going.

He tells my dad how nasty Jim treated the workers, how stupid the whole plan is and how his specifications for how he wanted this built were completed idiotic.

Whenever they’d offer up suggestions or point out why something he wanted was wrong, he’d essentially shut them down and use a bunch of slurs for Mexicans.

So they buried the water tower and built this secret entrance exactly as he wanted, knowing it was completely stupid.

He mentioned they only completed the job because Jim was paying them way more than they were used to making.

Everyone agreed Jim was a jerk but all the more reason to gouge your prices and take his money.

Things came to a head a few months later.

A year or so goes by when my dad gets a frantic call from Jim. It had rained quite a bit, which was unusual for the area, and now the entire ground floor area of the back of his home was bowed upward about 2 feet.

My dad goes to Jim’s and takes a look around, realizing what has happened. Given that they had essentially just buried a large hollow object underneath his home, the rain caused the water tower to be pushed upward and right through his first floor.

My dad explained the situation and Jim immediately lost it, starting ranting about how he should have never used those Mexican laborers and how he was gonna make them come fix it.

My dad mentioned how that was probably impossible since most of them go back and forth across the border but Jim was livid.

Jim wanted to blame anyone but himself.

My dad later found out from Jim that his insurance would not cover the damage to his home because he had buried a water tower under it without telling anyone.

He mentioned trying to sue the insurance company but that went nowhere.

He also tried numerous times to find the day laborers but was told you get what you get when you hire illegal workers to do a project that would never have gotten a permit.

Eventually, they were free of him.

Over the months afterward there was a lot of fallout for Jim and he couldn’t even live in his home due to the damage, it eventually was torn down to be able to remove the water tower from beneath it.

He burned through his lotto winnings pretty fast so he didn’t have anything left to rebuild it. He ended up selling the land and moving away about a year later.

Well that was a doozy.

I don’t know how anyone could have thought this was a good idea.

It just doesn’t make any sense.

It’s really not surprising.

Time and time again.

RIP to all that cash.

No more, no less.

Bless his heart.

Too bad about the money, though.