Home Forums Hunting & Shooting Hunter's Campfire EMP Attack On Power Grid Could Kill 9 out of 10 Americans

bummer is that 24HCF would be down

oh F that! we're doomed, doomed I'm tellin ya!


here I thought I was covered......and you had to bring that up

curse you TooDogs (grin)

On average, super solar flares like the 1859 Carrington event hit the planet about once every 500 years.

If you have a propane generator, you can buy a 250-500 gallon tank and store propane. It can keep forever, and you can run a generator a long time to keep food fresh or frozen until you eat it up.

Problem with power being out nationwide, is there is no one to help restore it. In isolated areas like hurricanes, help can come from around the country to help restore power. I live in central Alabama. I worked for a utility back then. We sent crews south to help get things back up and running. A nationwide outage can take up to 6 months or a year to restore power. That is where prepping comes in, food, water/water purification, guns and ammo for defense of your property and stuff, living in an area of people with like minds, self sufficient, etc. Worse case half the population would die from starvation, disease, riots, killing over food, etc. Best case, power gets restored quicker, maybe with foreign power workers sent to help.

Personally, I think we should do away with FEMA, and redirect these assets to the national guards. Guard units with generators, food, MRE's, water trucks, etc., expanded and stored throughout the country to handle such emergencies. Anything the feds do is too slow. Guard units can be called up by the governors for immediate on site help. Everything from police work, to generators for hospitals, grocery stores for food supply freshness, water filtration plants, and stores of MRE's and water for people who need immediate help. With an EMP, homes, buildings, etc will all be standing, not damaged like hurricanes.

Just MHO.

HA! Keep on thinking that cos when this EMP thing happens me and my Cherokee "REDSKIN" ancestors gonna grab our tomahawks and take our land back from the man. Gonna keep all your whiskey, gold and wimmens. We'll not be fooled by another Pilgrim and Thanksgiving day this time around.

We'll probably let you be Randy. As well as many of the other injun friendly good guys here at the Fire. You will all be required to smoke 'em pipe.

Chuck Norris will be our Chief!!!

I don't think it is practical to harden the whole system. The best thing we could do is make sure that critical infrastructures like hospitals, refineries, communications facilities, power plants and what not all have numerous large diesel generators with ample supplies of fuel. We could then, spend a little extra and build up stockpiles of spare transformers and other parts over the next decade.

The "just in time" supply chain that has developed over the last twenty years or so is the real enemy to any sort of preparedness.

I think it's more an issue of quarterly profits vs. long term planning that is the real enemy.

We aren't just vulnerable to EMP's, a large solar flare will cause problems and satelites are more vulnerable than ground based electrical devices. Loose telecom, companies can't process credit cards and even if their shelves are stocked with food or their tanks full of fuel, they won't sell anything if they can't get paid.

lordy but I've had a good life! It'd be better still though if someday I get to share a glass of good whiskey with you David.


never thought I'd be jealous of Bob, but seeing Karen and knowing he gets to hang out with you on occasion, well there it is!

Well that would take care of the global warming crisis

We have these things called circuit breakers, fuses, arrestors and surge suppressors now. The thingies power companies use to prevent power lines from melting when lightning strikes or induces a current from a near strike. Actually (I suspect, don't know) with a really old small system like traffic light control nobody thought to add protection beyond what little surge could hit it from known natural sources.

EMP is a humongous but very brief radio signal, Like all other radio signals it needs an antenna to get that energy into a device. Electrical wiring makes for a very nice antenna so that's your main threat. For unconnected devices you need an antenna of some sort, the bigger the "better." Like your radio, signal too weak pull out the antenna or add an external.

With small devices disconnected from the grid there's not much there to be an antenna so unless you're in the primary radiation area not so much energy couples in. And a metal case helps even if not really a Faraday cage. Like those metal coupons for your wallet they hawk on TV at exorbitant prices to block credit card RFID chips from being scanned. They don't block all of the signal but enough of it.

There is something to a device being safer if not energized. A surge can switch an energized device or more likely a chip into a self-destructive state.

It is a very complex subject that people including power system operators have been worrying about for a long time now.

nighthawk... no.

"11.04 The nuclear EMP is a time-varying electromagnetic radiation which increases very rapidly to a peak and then decays somewhat more slowly. The radiation has a very broad spectrum of frequencies, ranging from very low to several hundred megahertz but mainly in the radiofrequency (long wavelength) region.... Furthermore, the wave amplitude (or strength) of the radiation varies widely over this frequency range....."

The Effects of Nuclear Weapons, Glasstone and Dolan (Ed.), 3rd ed., 1977, Department of Defense and Department of Energy.

I'm fuzzy on this but as I recall E1 is given to mean by some the period between the initial flux and the peak which happens very quickly, on the order of 400 nanoseconds.

In a SHTF scenario....my friends & I are prepared...We discussed this a long time ago...as we age, we make changes & frequently discuss it...we will never starve to death...too many wild edibles, two of us are certified divers with a manual means to charge our tanks & a couple of PCP air guns. We also have a copious amount of firearms & components...life would certainly be different, but not life threatening....especially after we arrive at the pre planned destination on the North coast of Ca.

I was mostly disputing the phrase "With small devices disconnected from the grid there's not much there to be an antenna so unless you're in the primary radiation area not so much energy couples in."

Depending on the strength and distance of the initial blast, being disconnected may not help with modern electronics. As you say, it's very complicated and I'm a long time from my physics and electronics training.

The folks who think it can't affect anything but the utilities are mistaken. A Carrington event may only do that.. but even there we only know of one event in 155 years, so we really don't know how bad they can get. 150 years counts as squat as far as natural history and figuring out average intervals for significant events.

In short, there's not much really to do about the small electronics we have every day except to have a backup plan. But for the utilities, the gov't should be spending the $$ to harden them.

Last month:
[video:youtube]https://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_detailpage&v=efQoot2_XEM[/video]

There have been some interesting comments & some that are totally off base. I'm a power engineer & have been involved with power systems on critical satellite tracking stations & other critical government/military power installations. I'm not an EMP expert, but have been involved with the possibility of EMP damage since the 80's. There are two major components F1 & F2. F1 is more from solar flares, but can cause sensitive electronic equipment to fail. F2 is Gamma radiation & creates the most damage to electronics & the power grid. EMP weapons are real & have/are being deployed. Boeing & possibly other manufacturers have developed an EMP weapon. Boeing has also developed an electronic EMP package that is used on existing missiles to destroy incoming cruise missiles, ICBM's, bombers, UAV's, etc. This anti-missile systems needs to only be exploded in the vicinity of incoming threats to destroy them. Most of the critical military systems have been hardened to resist an EMP attack. Will they totally work? Difficult to say, but probably at least partially. The approaches I used in the 80's have already become outdated by newer designs. My greatest concern is the destruction of the power grid. I have been involved in power transformer design & manufacturing with Cooper, GE, Westinghouse, & many others & know of no way to protect them from an EMP attack. While I believe the total destruction of the power grid is unlikely since many weapons exploded at high altitudes would be required even a limited failure is catastrophic. Large power transformers would require years to replace & an ever increasing number are now manufactured off shore. While generators properly protected might supply critical power to military & government facilities I still have many concerns. Most building power systems require dry type transformers to step incoming voltages down & I believe most of these would also fail. Some of the hardened military systems obviously protect these as well, buy I am led to believe this would be an exception. Obviously, those in the cities would panic with out electric power & we would have mass riots & looting. Those in more rural areas who hunt & fish would obviously stand a greater chance of survival.

again the point is that solar flairs generate EMP , agree or disagree , personally i don�t care. The EMP from the stronger flairs show up all the time , static on radios , disruption in satellite service ��....... depending on the stranght of the flair .
The only real difference is that the effects are to some degree by the earths atmosphere . which from what i understand would nto be the case with a trully massive one.

The only thing ludicrous is the original article and its propaganda
Run scared if you like , its not going to change anything because in the end if someone did manage to detonate a weapon high enough above the US to cause the effects suggested in the article, we all will have far greater things to worry about as it will not be the only one coming or going out . It would also mean a near complete failure of near every aspect of our government ,military ,as well as several other countries early warning systems .
But if EMP worries you so much , then you really don�t want to know about the smaller tactical nukes that can be so small they aren�t much more then a 10s or hundreds of lbs of TnT
Probably a far greater chance one of those would find its way into being deployed as a terror use against you then a nuclear air bust

Those new EMP weapons are also different then the EMP from a high yield nuclear detonation. In comparison they are more pinpoint in that they effect a much smaller area .
This same scare went up when china started discussing developing a low yield EMP weapons .

It's a complex phenomena to start with and convoluted explanations make it all the worse. When in doubt go back to basic principles. We have this great honkin' blast of radio frequency energy and, say, a cell phone. How does that energy get in there? An antenna of some sort. The strength of a signal captured by an antenna, the amount of energy coupled into the circuit, is directly related to the length of the antenna (Denton is the real expert here). Circuit board traces, even the antenna given the cellular frequency, are pretty darn small. So a smaller proportion of field energy gets coupled into the device. How much is hard to predict and how much is proportional to the field strength and this is where it all gets sticky. But every electronic device in the country won't get toasted from a single EMP event.

Small stuff will fry if the field strength is great enough but the stuff with long wires or connected to long wires will capture much more energy and go first and farther out from the event.

Judge Jeanine over-hypes everything. I've pretty much given up watching her show.

Captchee,

Sometimes I act like an ass when there's no reason for it. My response to your earlier posts are an example.


Sorry...

So tell us about these tactical nukes..