George Rebane

[This is the addended transcript of my regular KVMR commentary broadcast on 15 Auguest 2014.]

Imagine the next time the lights go out and your house settles into that unnatural but familiar silence when there is a power outage.  You know what to do.  If you have a landline phone in your house, you call PG&E to report your outage or get a recorded update that tells you they know about the problem.  But your landline phone is dead.  You automatically grab your cell phone, but it also is dead.  As you go through the house attempting to turn on every battery powered electronic device the result it the same, it is dead.

Going outside you meet your next door neighbor who has just gone through the same experience.  As other people start coming out of their houses, you and your neighbor decide to drive into town to see if you can discover the nature and extent of such an outage that no one has experienced.  But turning the ignition key in your car yields the same result.  Nobody on your street can start their cars.  And then you notice it, an eerie silence from all directions that is not broken by any distant sirens or road noises.  The world has shut down.

What I have described here is the likely scenario after the first few minutes after your part of the world is hit by a massive electromagnetic pulse or EMP.  Should such an EMP strike, it would literally fry every unshielded microchip, making useless the device it controls and operates.  And today microchips control literally everything in the developed world, from national power grids down to the little chip in your child’s delightfully entertaining toy, and everything in between.

Now fast forward a day and things will have already started getting dicey as people discover they are running out of food and drinking water.  Emergency control authorities tell us that almost all communities across the land have food on the shelves to last at most three days.  Without replenishment the result will soon be massive civil disturbances.  I leave the rest to your imagination.

Why should we worry about such an EMP scenario?  Well because committees and study groups of the best technical and strategic thinkers assembled by the federal government, like the EMP Commission, have long concluded that a successful EMP attack on the United States would bring our civilization to a grinding halt.  For example, in their now declassified 2008 report they estimate “that within 12 months of a nationwide blackout, up to 90% of the U.S. population could possibly perish from starvation, disease and societal breakdown.” (more here and here)

For decades we have known that such devastating EMPs can be generated by high altitude and low earth orbit nuclear detonations.  Every nuclear capable nation has studied and/or prepared strategic weapons based on EMP.  Today our military and civil leadership fears that such capability is not far from being acquired by terrorists and religious zealots now organized as the Islamic State that is currently ravaging Iraq.

It turns out that in the same timeframe studies by the congressional Commission on the Strategic Posture of the United States, the National Academy of Sciences, the Department of Energy, the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission, and the National Intelligence Council “reached similar conclusions”, namely that “EMP, is ‘the most significant threat’ to the U.S. and our allies in the world.”

And if that does not get you to sit up and take notice, consider that there is a second even more powerful and natural source of a massive EMP.  Scientists have recently begun warning us that something called a coronal mass ejection or CME from the sun has hit the earth many times in the past and will most certainly do so again in the near future.  A mild one hit eastern Canada in 1989 and knocked out its power grid that also reached into the US.  A large one hit the country in the 1850s that literally fried our telegraph system, the only electrical infrastructure we had at the time.  Such a CME today would give rise to the scenario our nation’s brain trust has described above.

There is a lot more to say about the subject, but my time is about up.  Please educate yourself on large scale emergencies like the EMP that could strike us at any time.  And then ask your local emergency preparedness people what you should do to best weather such a calamity.  When it happens, don’t add to the problem but be ready to become part of the solution.

My name is Rebane, and I also expand on this and related themes on georgerebane.com where an addended transcript of this commentary is posted with relevant links, and where such issues are debated extensively.  However my views are not necessarily shared by KVMR.  Thank you for listening.

[Addendum]  EMP is a large scale emergency which comes in many types including terrorist attack of a metropolitan area, large earthquake (‘The Big One’), pandemic, volcanic eruption, etc.  I have defined a large scale emergency for an area as being one when you call 911, no one answers.  Fortunately, we in the Sierra foothills are directly exposed to only few of them.  But unfortunately living downwind from and in the proximity of two large metropolitan areas, we are indirectly exposed to all of them.  Our main exposure will be from what can be called the ‘Head for the hills syndrome’, because historically that is where people seeking to avoid a calamity have headed.  Here in Nevada County we are not prepared to receive the tens of thousands then heading up Highways 20 and 49.  If we cannot turn them back, we will die with them.

Returning to the EMP catastrophe, the two kinds I cited are distinct in how much warning each provides.  With today’s modern systems monitoring the sun, the CME induced EMP will allow the authorities to give several hours to a couple of days warning, identifying the exact part of earth that will be impacted.  The terrorist launched EMP will most likely give us no warning at all.  If you don’t see the nuclear fireball, then you won’t even know what caused the world to suddenly blink out.

There are some things a civilian household can do to prepare.  Each county has an Office of Emergency Services with a website that usually has a page dedicated to preparedness (here is the link for the Nevada County EOS, and information can also be requested via email from oes@co.nevada.ca.us).  For CME induced EMPs the Rebanes have two grounded metal garbage cans inside one of which is taped a list of items that we want put there when the warning is issued.  We will make sure that none of the items touch the metal insides by putting the items first into a cardboard box and/or lining the inside with pieces of cardboard.

In addition to laying in a store of food and water, make sure you have a stash of needed medicines and other critical consumables on hand.  If you have a survivable generator – most that are housed in a grounded metal box will survive – then having a reserve of fuel for it would be wise, especially if the generator is to power a well pump.  And what must you have in your car to survive there for a few days if you are caught out on the road?

But one of the most important things you can do in preparation is to talk to your family and neighbors.  Do all members of your household know what to do and where to head for when a large scale emergency happens?  Remember, pooling resources and organizing reigns supreme in the midst of chaos.  Small islands of cooperating people have a much higher likelihood of survival as in due course they join with other such groups to reestablish lawful society.

Additional information from – Forbes, NASA, Christian Science Monitor, Heritage, Hot Air, and more from NASA for the mathematically incined.