Looking for a habitable island type location

[Breezybealle]

I am in the process of writing a Zombie (ugh! not another zombie novel) apocalypse story and I need help with a location. I live in Florida so I don't really know of anything outside it's borders... what I am looking for is the possibility of a town/city/etc. that is located within a boat drive to a small island. To give you a better idea of what I'm looking for, I'm trying to make it so that once everything calms down, people will start to rebuild a community of sorts on an island type thing. I've seen movies where ferries take people to small remote islands, I just don't know where any are located. Or if someone can help think of something else that could hold quite a few people securely once all barriers have been located & well, barricaded, lol. Like maybe a giant football stadium or an abandoned jail (i.e. Alcatraz but I've seen that in a movie or two, also). The small island thing would be my best scenario because it would be a lot harder for the zombies to reach...

I'd even take a list of things that can be fully fenced in. (I know my daughters elementary school has a thick iron fence that encloses the entire thing. Once the bell rings, the maintenance man drives on his golf cart to each gate & locks everyone in behind him so that the only way in is through the front office, so that may be a possibility. Plus that would give them a cafeteria, an auditorium and they could turn each classroom into individual "housing" so to speak.) But I still need as many ideas as possible.

 

[ThinkerX]

There are entire archapegalos of small islands close to Florida. Some are very poor, though, with 'zombie' traditions of their own (Haiti), while others are favorate haunts of drug smuggling psycopaths (Bahama's). The Antilles tend to be better off economically; a couple of them (the Virgin Islands) are actually territories of the US. (Puerto Rico is a US commonwealth).

 

[CupofJoe]

If you are looking around for island cities to get some ideas, I would think of Venice [Italy], Portsmouth [UK], Hong Kong [PRC] and Singapore [er... Singapore] as places to start.
All of these have water all around them and only a few land connections [bridges or tunnels] but aren't so isolated that they would be impossible to get to.
Venice is fairly tiny but HK and Singapore have airports, harbours and populations in to the millions.
Portsmouth is somewhere in-between.

 

[wordwalker]

Sounds like what you want is not a city but a lightly-populated (and lightly-infested) place that could be cleared out and and built up. Also, it shouldn't be too near the shore: zombies and other undead are great at getting through water because they don't breathe, or float-- if they know you're there they can just walk across.

 

[Breezybealle]

Like I said, it doesn't necessarily have to be an island. The more I think about it, the harder that would be to pull off. And I'd already factored in the thought that they could walk across the bottom of any water setting since they don't have to breathe. More than likely they're not going to all go for a swim based on the possibility that people may be miles away from shore on another island, so it's plausible that they'd only get zombies on the new habitat few & far between. I'm still going to have watchtowers, lookouts & such.

So I guess, I'm back to places within the US that could be barricaded in and rebuilt as a new community. Does anyone have any ideas as to how I could do that? What types of places could be habitable after such an event? (amusement parks? hotels? resorts? campgrounds? ...I'm trying to think outside the box) I'm sure there are some facilities that are prepared to work if some major power outage were to happen. IE backup generators that could/would run for an extended length of time if not permanently. For instance, hospitals... since life or death relies on the machines, I assume they'd have generators that would run at least a good portion of the hospital if a major disaster were to happen? Or Police stations? What about the CDC? Don't they have some hidden remote locations where they are prepared for viral outbreaks? I'm sure there are plenty of places that would fit this scenario, but I wouldn't even know where to start on research for them. It's not like there is some website that lists how each and every individual business/institution/facility is built & run. And I'm so out of my depth in technical knowledge that I probably wouldn't even be able to make this stuff up and have it be even semi- believable.


A plus would be if I could create several of them, maybe a total of 4 or 5 in spaced out locations that eventually could interact with each other..... I'm going to have it setup so that to be inside the communities, everyone has to "register". It'll go back to old school hand written, manilla filing before the days of the computer, which is what we would have to do if something really were to happen. I will have each of them also make a video registry so that people who are looking for other survivors could search through them and would know if there loved ones were alive or not. In my head, I have a whole basic reformatting of human life. [That's going to be the problem in getting across in my story without boring the reader to death with details.]

 

[Breezybealle]

@ CupOfJoe: Thanks so much for the ideas, but the only problem with those is that they are way far off from where I need to be. My characters are based in the US so it'd have to be something accessible from there.

 

[ThinkerX]

Prisons. Designed to keep people in AND out. (I live fairly close to one).

I believe I already gave you a technical breakdown on power generation and cell phones in your other thread.

 

[wordwalker]

Prisons. Designed to keep people in AND out. (I live fairly close to one).

I believe I already gave you a technical breakdown on power generation and cell phones in your other thread.

Used in the Walking Dead. Although, zombipocalypse stories may depend on hitting the same notes out of posing the same questions.

 

[ThinkerX]

Hmmm...given the right geography, access to heavy equipment (Cats, backhoes, ect), and a willingness to engage in major property destruction, a determined enough group could literally 'wall off a sizable chunk of real estate in short order.

They'd want an elevated area with good soil for gardening and a stream running through it for the micro-hydro project. Given the right sort of people (construction workers and engineers, preferably with military experience) they could probably wall off a couple of square miles in a couple of months, house and feed thousands of people, and provide some electricity. But it would be Hell's own mess, make no mistake about it.

 

[Breezybealle]

I was actually able to find quite a few places that are already pre-planned for disaster based housing. One case is in the mojave desert... a man actually built an underground complex that can hold I think up to 1100 people in style... he is taking reservations at $5000 per adult/$2500 per child and the total is $50,000.00 to purchase a room. Plus there are a lot of underground silo's that were built in the 1950's that people have purchased and turned into shelters all over the US. One bunker, supposedly built directly under the Capitol building is rumored to have enough room to house 3,000+ people, with tunnels large enough for vehicles to drive through. And there are a couple more gov't complexes that are hush hush, but supposedly exist underground, too. So, I guess anything I come up with on my own would be plausible.

I'm trying to stay away from prisons because like I said before, two movies were already filmed using Alcatraz as a shelter and of course, TWD's main holding place is the prison, too.