In September 1859, there weren’t many people interacting with electrically charged devices. Those who were found themselves thrust into a frightening and chaotic experience as telegraph stations were fried by the supercharged energy flowing through their wires. Technicians suffered electric shocks, fires burst out, and the circuits went dead, cutting off most communications across the globe.
The earth had just taken the full brunt of a Coronal Mass Ejection – a burst of magnetized plasma from the sun’s upper atmosphere, the corona. Actually, the Earth had taken three of them, concentrated direct hits in what history would later call The Carrington Event.
Named in honor of Richard Carrington – one of the two astronomers who was looking at the sun when it happened – the phenomenon delighted everyone on earth not working in a telegraph office with spectacular auroras in the sky, even in latitudes around the tropics where such displays were so rare as to be almost unheard of.
[Fun Fact: A couple of creative telegraph operators figured out that by turning off their batteries they could safely communicate using nothing more than the massive amounts of energy surrounding them as a power source.]
These ejections, also known as solar flares, emanate from our sun all the time. Most of the time they blast into space but occasionally their trajectory partially intersects Earth. The Carrington Event hit dead on and the resulting geomagnetic storm reaped havoc on the limited technology of the day. Solar flares in recent years such as 2017, 2012, 2007, and 2003 had varying effects. The most damaging one was in 1989 which caused a nine-hour outage to the Hydro-Québec power grid. An event in 1921 dimmed the streetlights in New York City and stopped the New York Central Railroad. Another that occurred in 1972 would have delivered a lethal dose of radiation to astronauts had NASA not been in between the Apollo 16 and 17 missions.
These things happen. All the time.
Solar flares are just one more reason why it’s a good idea to buy an old plow truck or a 1984 Jeep Wrangler. Or at least a bike and some backup tires for it. Why? Because unlike your cell phone, modern car, LED flashlight, or local power grid, an old truck will still work after a massive solar flare knocks us back to early industrial age technology. Steam engines will be all the rage on that day, and the guy who knows how to distill diesel fuel from discarded plastic will be a millionaire. You’ll have to pay him for it in gold or ammo however, because cash will be just paper, which it always was. But he might be willing to trade you the fuel for a can of fruit, if you’ve got it.
Welcome to Prepping for the Apocalypse part II, where the best laid plans get thrown out the window. Because…chaos…and science.
EMPs and Solar Flares
Solar flares are often benign or even welcome to the stargazers among us. But a major one would be devastating and nobody knows to what extent. Here’s another fun fact: Everything I’ve just described can also happen if someone in Beijing or Washington D.C. (or both) decides to detonate a nuclear weapon in the upper atmosphere. Every electronic device on the ground within line-of-sight of that detonation will be fried by the electromagnetic pulse (EMP) just like the telegraph lines in 1859. The higher the detonation in the atmosphere, the larger the affected area.
Here’s a science lesson you can do with the kids:
Take a flashlight, turn it on, and hold it on the surface of a globe.* A nuke detonated on the surface will destroy only that which is lit – first by the heat, then by the blast, and lastly by the radiation. Now hold the flashlight an inch off the surface and turn on the light. A nuke detonated at that elevation won’t destroy the surface, but it will render everything within the circumference of that light’s beam inoperable. Hold the flashlight higher and everything in the expanded beam will now be affected. **
“Okay, kids. See all of that lit area. That’s where people are gonna be fighting one another for the last box of Cheerios in a darkened store with no registers, and where guys in Priuses and Beamers are going to be crying in front of ATMs with handfuls of useless plastic.”
“Is that why we have guns, Daddy?”
“Yes Sweetie, that’s why we have guns.”
Both an EMP attack or massive solar flare could cause the same headache for you and your family. In the extreme scenario, even in the most charitable society thousands of people would die in the first several days – people on dialysis or life-sustaining temperature-sensitive medications, people in cold climates with no backup heat source. In a city populated with sizable quantities of fools and jerks (i.e., most places) societal breakdown would probably be immediate. The book Lights Out: A Cyberattack: A Nation Unprepared: Surviving the Aftermath describes this in greater detail. Tens of thousands would die in the days and weeks after, millions in the months that follow as food runs out and vehicular shipment ceases, to say nothing about marauding bands of pirates. So, prepare for it now.
I wrote a piece recently on several basic steps you can take to safeguard against any emergency. You can read that here. But specific to an EMP or solar flare (or cyberattack that destroy the electrical grid), here are a few other things you can do:
Vehicles: Purchase or restore a vehicle that is older than 1985. Alternatively, you may still be able to operate a newer model vehicle but the literature is inconclusive on that matter. Don’t bet on it. Generally, the rule of thumb is the fewer the electronics, the more likely it will survive. Aircraft are still designed to fly with catastrophic electrical failures so don’t expect everything to fall from the sky, but you also can’t plan on anything working in an unprecedented event. If you’ve been looking for a reason to get that kickstart motorcycle or dirt bike, it wouldn’t be a bad idea. But you should already have a mountain bike and a good pair of boots.
Tools: Battery operated tools or generators might work till the battery is gone, and gas operated ones will work so long as they don’t use an electric start (and you have fuel) but electrically corded ones are out. Get some hand tools, hand saws, hand crank coffee grinders, etc… For anything you use that requires electricity, get a manual backup or plan on going without it. This includes a hand pump for your water well.
Faraday Box/Cage: These are basically boxes to keep sensitive electronics in. Theoretically, you could make one large enough to serve as a garage or hangar like the military does, but for most of us this means a small box or metal trash can. Place electronic items in it to store and preserve for future use, like computers, hard drives, or electric start generators or solar products.
Books: The design principles for wells, latrines, steam engines, and magnetically powered electronic devices are out there. Get a few books or print out some instructions on these topics and start collecting the materials to make them. Have science days with your kids and learn the principles of currents and charges. Experiment with designing a cell phone charger that runs off rare earth magnets.
On Sunday Feb 26th we had an intense auroral display that my friend got on video. This was officially listed by NASA as a G3 (Strong) geomagnetic storm from coronal ejections observed on Feb 2nd (the Carrington Event was a G5, or X-40 on the Kyoto Dst index. These things happen, and nobody can predict when or how strong they will be. All we can do is react to them, and history proves we’re often caught with our pants down.
But you don’t have to be one of those who didn’t see the chaos coming and don’t know what to do about it. Remember, steam powered vehicles sounded like a waste of time and resources when everyone had a sailboat and a horse, until someone decided to invent them. Learn from that guy.
Stay tuned in the coming weeks for Prepping for the Apocalypse part III: Bugging out.
* Every home should have a globe. This is why people make fun of American geography skills.
**Depending on several factors such as the weapons composition, atmospheric conditions, etc… Also, the magnetosphere may disrupt the charges disbursement into non-circular patterns on the surface.
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