Originally, I had planned to publish the rest of the weather related ‘What’s Next’ articles before this one. However, my plans have changed. During my daily interwebz scrolling I came across an article by Thomas LaDuke over at RedState.
In the article LaDuke explains that the sun is moving into a more active phase, meaning more solar flares and the possibility of a coronal mass ejection hitting earth.
Well, a new report has scientists predicting that the sun is going into a more active period of burping up coronal ejections, and what I described above could very well happen and they cover it right here.
“There have been a lot of (solar) flares,” Becker said. “Flares are when the sun brightens, and we see the radiation, and that’s kind of the muzzle flash. And then the cannon shot is the coronal mass ejection (CME). So, we can see the flash, but then the coronal mass ejection can go off in some random direction in space, but we can tell when they’re actually going to head towards Earth. And that gives us about 18 hours of warning, maybe 24 hours of warning, before those particles actually get to Earth and start messing with Earth’s magnetic field.”
Large blobs of plasma, or superheated matter, fly through space in a CME. A percentage hit the Earth, which distorts our planet’s magnetic field. That third prong on the electric plug, which usually gives excess electrical charges a safe place to go, becomes “like a big electrical circuit.”
“And then you get this kind of insidious thing where you could actually get current from ground,” Becker said. “So everybody thinks, ‘Oh, my computer’s grounded, I’m okay,'” but in an event like this, if you drive inductive currents to the surface of the Earth, it can almost work backwards, and you can end up actually frying things that you thought were relatively safe.”
The power grid, satellites, underground fiber optic cable with copper sheaths, navigation and GPS systems, radio transmitters and communications equipment are all vulnerable.
He gets it right as far as he (and Fox) goes-I wrote about the effects of CME and EMP a while ago in much more detail. You can find that article here if you want to know the down and dirty.
What I’m going to do today is lay out what would happen if there was a Carrington Event level CME hit earth today. For those who don’t feel like clicking the link, The Carrington Event was the most intense geomagnetic storm in recorded history, that peaked 1-2 September 1859. It created strong auroral displays that were reported globally and caused sparking and even fires in multiple telegraph stations.
There is a more recent event that we can look to for clues; the March 1989 Quebec Blackout. On 13 March, a relatively weak CME hit the earth’s magnetosphere causing a shutdown of Hydro-Quebec’s transmission system. The James Bay network went off line in less than 90 seconds and the associated blackout lasted 9 hours. In the case of a strong CME, power would be out for far longer, and the effects could be catastrophic.
In a 2008 NASA funded report, co-author John Kappenmann of the Metatech Corporation looked at the great geomagnetic storm of May 1921, which produced ground currents as much as ten times stronger than the 1989 Quebec storm, and modeled its effect on the modern power grid. He found more than 350 transformers at risk of permanent damage and 130 million people without power. The loss of electricity would ripple across the social infrastructure with “water distribution affected within several hours; perishable foods and medications lost in 12-24 hours; loss of heating/air conditioning, sewage disposal, phone service, fuel re-supply and so on.”
Let’s take a look at what the damage from a large CME would look like.
One study by electrical grid experts identified 9 major transformer sites as critical. A failure at just one of those nodes would cause a cascading shutdown of the entire US electrical grid outside of Texas. High voltage transformers are expensive and difficult to manufacture. There are only a couple of locations world-wide that make them, and none stateside. As far as I know, there are only 2 or 3 of them in the US to be used as replacements, as they rarely fail. In the event of a large CME nearly all of the high voltage transformers in the country would need to be replaced, thousands and thousands of them.
Then there are the transmission lines themselves. As I’m sure you know, when you run excessive voltage through a wire it gets hot and can burn through. Imagine that with a 500kva line. Because of the way EMP propagates the longer the “fetch” -the distance the pulse travels- is the more damage a pulse will cause. Nearly all the high tension transmission lines will have to be replaced. Millions of miles of wire.
Communications will also be disrupted. Putting aside the power issue, our society is dependent on mobile phones for communication. The cellular network that mobile phones run on will go down. Add to that the fact that very few people have actual wired ‘landlines’ anymore. Most home phones are now VoIP, that is voice over internet protocol, and rely on the internet for connectivity. Even if people still had landlines in the traditional sense, that system would be compromised as well because of the wiring involved. As I mentioned above, during the Carrington event, the EM surge burned out telegraph lines.
The internet as we know it would cease to exist. The backbone of the internet – server farms – require immense amounts of electricity. They are also susceptible to damage from voltage spikes. An EM surge from a CME has the potential to fry the sensitive parts in any computer, and that’s just what a server is, a computer. The biggest issue, and this goes for any electronic device, is that the EM surge is just as likely to travel on the neutral or ground wire as it is on the hot wires. If that happens, the damage will be much more severe as very few surge protection devices cover the neutral or ground wire.
Oddly enough, most ICE vehicles would likely still run. For all intents and purposes, a car or truck is a rolling Faraday cage. The body panels surrounding the sensitive electronics act as an EM shield and the tires are an insulator. Will your Tesla still go? Maybe, but you won’t have anyplace to charge it.
While researching for my EMP/CME article (linked above) I found some disturbing things. It is widely accepted that if the power was out for more than a week nationwide approximately 25% of the population would perish. That number goes up to 60% if the outage lasts more than a month and 90% if it lasts 3 months. You might ask why the numbers seem so high, and there are answers for that.
The primary driver of mortality in a grid-down situation will be the lack of food and clean water. Both require electricity to deliver. As I wrote about in The rule of Threes, you can live for about three days without water and about three weeks without food.
For most of us, water, whether it comes from a municipal source or your own well, is dependent on electricity for delivery. If the grid goes down, so does the water supply. If you don’t have access to a supply of clean water you can expect a less than pleasant end.
Our current society relies on a process known as just-in-time replenishment. Simply put, your local grocery store (or any kind of store really) does not have large quantities of back stock on hand. At most, they’ll have two or three days of stock on hand. The system they use tracks inventory and sales to estimate what the store will actually need and sell in a given week. In a catastrophic grid failure, this system will come to a complete halt, meaning stores will run out of product within a few days.
So, what can you do to prepare for a major TEOTWAWKI situation? That depends on your location and how well you’ve prepared. A plan is essential as is a “team”. I’ll get into the team concept in a later article, but the basic idea is that you get together with a group of likeminded people with different skill sets and make a plan for when SHTF. While I personally know enough to survive just about anything on my own, most of you don’t have the same life experiences and training I have, so you’ll need a team of people who can fill the gaps.
To be brutally frank, if you live in a major metro area, you may as well make your peace with God. I really don’t like to say that, but it’s an unfortunate truth, and I see no reason to sugarcoat it. Unlike anywhere outside of a city, the urban areas lack everything you’ll need to survive. Water is non-existent, there is little if any game to hunt for food, and worst of all, you’ll have to deal with everyone else in the area. Expect your city to be completely depleted of useful resources within 72 hours of grid-down. If you live in a city, have a plan to get out and a location to get to.
The suburbs will be a little better. You’ll still have to deal with your neighbors, but food and water will be a bit more accessible. If you don’t have easy access to water, think about bugging out to an alternate location. Note I just said water and not clean water. You can make water safe to drink relatively easily, and even less-than-clean water can be used for lots of things (just don’t drink or cook with it). Look for an upcoming article about water purification.
If you live in the exurbs or a rural area your chances are better. Water and game should be easy to get. Additionally, you can forage for additional foodstuffs. In a long-term SHTF scenario, a rural setting will allow you to plant crops.
Any way you cut it, a long term grid-down situation will be extremely rough to weather.
As this article is getting a bit long, I’m ending it here. There is an upcoming piece on the things you need to do and have to survive longer term. Continue to watch this site for more information.