Posted on 04/04/2016 5:37:17 AM PDT by Gen.Blather
I don’t don’t doubt that a high altitude EMP attack could cause a lot of damage in the NE corridor or Southern California; however, I don’t think electronic components would be so universally affected.
Many reside in somewhat unintended Faraday cages (metal buildings and metal chassis), many others would be only slightly effected in ways that a knowledgeable electrician could fairly quickly overcome (large generators with a circuit board, bypass the circuit board and presto it works).
Transportation electronics getting fried would likely be a huge problem, but used and new car/truck lots across the rest of North America would pool to the effected area at 60 mph, and high rate production of replacement electronics would be in place within 3 months. Locomotives would also roll in from other areas and the operation schedules would ramp up to cover the need. Also, transportation would be thin, but it would also be focused on the essentials.
Robust electronics, such as your house lighting and motors are going to be unaffected, while microprocessors are going to be what gets cooked. So my thermostat might get fried, but if I pull it from the wall and reinstall a mercury switch (or put it on mechanical timer) it will likely be fine.
The power grid would likely get fried, but again its not like the infrastructure disappears, you just have fried control switches. On site generators would be the easiest to fix and get operating, so diesel supply would become a priority for grocery stores, hospitals, etc. And again, generators from outside the effected area would be rolling in very quickly (presuming the government didn’t prevent profiting from it).
Yes, people would die, probably thousands maybe tens of thousands, but I really don’t think a million. The loss in productivity would could top a trillion dollars perhaps and that would be the most destructive element, as non-working people would burn through their savings very quickly. And life would suck for people used to a pampered modern lifestyle.
Civil riots? Yes, urban centers would go crazy for the first 48 hours, looting and burning with the realization that no one was going to stop them. Then as they hit the suburbs, they would meet a hail of gunfire from working folks who realized that there is no one to stop them either.
Katrina and the Gulf Coast does provide a good example. Outside of New Orleans, areas pulled together. People took their frozen food to neighbors who had generators. One contractor (of many) set up a large generator and everyone brought their chest freezers to his driveway. They were prepared to get by on their own for a month...survivors. On the other end of the spectrum was the man setting on his porch in New Orleans who when interviewed complained about government inaction and stated, “That woman has been lying dead on the street in front of my house for 3 days and no one has even come to cover her with a blanket.” It never occurred to him that he himself could do something...not a survivor.
Finally, presuming we had a real President, the loss of life in the attacking country would be staggeringly high and nearly instantaneous, as entire cities were vaporized in a nuclear furnace.
When the power goes off, why do all stores and sources of water immediately disappear in your scenario? No bottled water? No swimming pools? No rivers? No lakes? No streams? No rain? I know that long term re supply of potable water, in urban areas especially, will bring many challenges and hardship, but near nobody will die of dehydration in the U.S. in 3 days, unless they are immobilized and criminally neglected.
http://www.wsj.com/articles/SB10001424052702304851104579359141941621778
Many of the system’s most important components sit out in the open, often in remote locations, protected by little more than cameras and chain-link fences.
Transmission substations are critical links in the grid. They make it possible for electricity to move long distances, and serve as hubs for intersecting power lines.
Within a substation, transformers raise the voltage of electricity so it can travel hundreds of miles on high-voltage lines, or reduce voltages when electricity approaches its destination. The Metcalf substation functions as an off-ramp from power lines for electricity heading to homes and businesses in Silicon Valley.
The country’s roughly 2,000 very large transformers are expensive to build, often costing millions of dollars each, and hard to replace. Each is custom made and weighs up to 500,000 pounds, and “I can only build 10 units a month,” said Dennis Blake, general manager of Pennsylvania Transformer in Pittsburgh, one of seven U.S. manufacturers. The utility industry keeps some spares on hand.
A 2009 Energy Department report said that “physical damage of certain system components (e.g. extra-high-voltage transformers) on a large scale…could result in prolonged outages, as procurement cycles for these components range from months to years.”
Mr. Wellinghoff said a FERC analysis found that if a surprisingly small number of U.S. substations were knocked out at once, that could destabilize the system enough to cause a blackout that could encompass most of the U.S.
http://www.wsj.com/articles/SB10001424052702304851104579359141941621778
To some, the Metcalf incident has lifted the discussion of serious U.S. grid attacks beyond the theoretical. “The breadth and depth of the attack was unprecedented” in the U.S., said Rich Lordan, senior technical executive for the Electric Power Research Institute. The motivation, he said, “appears to be preparation for an act of war.”
The attack lasted slightly less than an hour, according to the chronology assembled by the Journal.
At 12:58 a.m., AT&T fiber-optic telecommunications cables were cut—in a way that made them hard to repair—in an underground vault near the substation, not far from U.S. Highway 101 just outside south San Jose. It would have taken more than one person to lift the metal vault cover, said people who visited the site.
Nine minutes later, some customers of Level 3 Communications, an Internet service provider, lost service. Cables in its vault near the Metcalf substation were also cut.
At 1:31 a.m., a surveillance camera pointed along a chain-link fence around the substation recorded a streak of light that investigators from the Santa Clara County Sheriff’s office think was a signal from a waved flashlight. It was followed by the muzzle flash of rifles and sparks from bullets hitting the fence.
The substation’s cameras weren’t aimed outside its perimeter, where the attackers were. They shooters appear to have aimed at the transformers’ oil-filled cooling systems. These began to bleed oil, but didn’t explode, as the transformers probably would have done if hit in other areas.
About six minutes after the shooting started, PG&E confirms, it got an alarm from motion sensors at the substation, possibly from bullets grazing the fence, which is shown on video.
Four minutes later, at 1:41 a.m., the sheriff’s department received a 911 call about gunfire, sent by an engineer at a nearby power plant that still had phone service.
Riddled with bullet holes, the transformers leaked 52,000 gallons of oil, then overheated. The first bank of them crashed at 1:45 a.m., at which time PG&E’s control center about 90 miles north received an equipment-failure alarm.
Five minutes later, another apparent flashlight signal, caught on film, marked the end of the attack. More than 100 shell casings of the sort ejected by AK-47s were later found at the site.
At 1:51 a.m., law-enforcement officers arrived, but found everything quiet. Unable to get past the locked fence and seeing nothing suspicious, they left.
A PG&E worker, awakened by the utility’s control center at 2:03 a.m., arrived at 3:15 a.m. to survey the damage.
Grid officials routed some power around the substation to keep the system stable and asked customers in Silicon Valley to conserve electricity.
In a news release, PG&E said the substation had been hit by vandals. It has since confirmed 17 transformers were knocked out.
Mr. Wellinghoff, then chairman of FERC, said that after he heard about the scope of the attack, he flew to California, bringing with him experts from the Joint Warfare Analysis Center in Dahlgren, Va. After walking the site with PG&E officials and FBI agents, Mr. Wellinghoff said, the military experts told him it looked like a professional job.
In addition to fingerprint-free shell casings, they pointed out small piles of rocks, which they said could have been left by an advance scout to tell the attackers where to get the best shots.
“They said it was a targeting package just like they would put together for an attack,” Mr. Wellinghoff said.
Mr. Wellinghoff, now a law partner at Stoel Rives LLP in San Francisco, said he arranged a series of meetings in the following weeks to let other federal agencies, including the Department of Homeland Security, know what happened and to enlist their help. He held a closed-door meeting with utility executives in San Francisco in June and has distributed lists of things utilities should do to strengthen their defenses.
A spokesman for Homeland Security said it is up to utilities to protect the grid. The department’s role in an emergency is to connect federal agencies and local police and facilitate information sharing, the spokesman said.
As word of the attack spread through the utility industry, some companies moved swiftly to review their security efforts. “We’re looking at things differently now,” said Michelle Campanella, an FBI veteran who is director of security for Consolidated Edison Inc. in New York. For example, she said, Con Ed changed the angles of some of its 1,200 security cameras “so we don’t have any blind spots.”
Some of the legislators Mr. Wellinghoff briefed are calling for action. Rep. Henry Waxman (D., Calif.) mentioned the incident at a FERC oversight hearing in December, saying he was concerned that no one in government can order utilities to improve grid protections or to take charge in an emergency.
As for Mr. Wellinghoff, he said he has made something of a hobby of visiting big substations to look over defenses and see whether he is questioned by security details or local police. He said he typically finds easy access to fence lines that are often close to important equipment.
“What keeps me awake at night is a physical attack that could take down the grid,” he said. “This is a huge problem.”
Horse spit! Mankind is a natural survivor in fact the best! We managed to not only survived in an environment with no electricity we thrived. When my great grandmother and grandfather started this ranch they lived in a hole in the side of a hill close to the spring. It wasn’t that long ago. One thing a person will find out quickly is how little they need to survive and important certain items are. Where the real problem will be is in the urban anthills we call cities.
Comment by David Roland after the WSH Metcalf story:
The most obvious conclusion to draw from this article is that a hostile foreign country has the goal of neutralizing the USA. My guess would be Iran. After all, they’ve boasted about having the capability of striking us internally.
This would then be just one sleeper cell in action, testing the feasibility of knocking out our power system. Cells like this don’t exist without some serious prior training and money to support their ongoing operation. And the grid system isn’t their only possible target - our water supply and reservoirs are equally fragile.
Read some history folks! Almost every world power thought that they were impregnable. But a determined enemy found a way to strike them unexpectedly nonetheless. The writing is on the wall;
“Mene, Mene, Tekel, and Parsin. ... Mene, God has numbered the days of your kingdom and brought it to an end; Tekel, you have been weighed in the balances and found wanting; Peres, your kingdom is divided and given to the Medes and Persians.”
EMP Danger Bump
Congratulations, you family will survive.
What do you think will happen in NYC or LA if they lose electrical power for a month or longer?
How much food do they grow in walking distance, without diesel fuel, seeds, chemicals, etc?
What, pray tell, will millions of city dwellers eat and drink, when the stores are looted on day three, and the generators that run the backup water pumps run out of diesel and stop pumping?
An EMP blast would neutralize ALL things
electrical, so NO civilian plane would not be safe.
No ignitors for the engines, no gyros for
directional locations, no radios for pilots to alert
any airfields, no radars to know where the planes
went down, no phones for that last ‘I love you’,
never mind medical equipment for the
comatose, the surgeon at work, the dentist at work,
and so on, within the radius of the effectiveness
of that ONE bomb.
before the liberal scourge can be defeated, LA or NYC or maybe both must be severely damaged.
Until these bases of power are gone, the cities and thus the democrats will rule
But few can be destroyed at one time, and once concerted attacks are identified, the locations can be guarded.
Its a case where protecting from day 1 attacks isn’t worth the cost, but a known solution is readily available.
We just lost power from a windstorm. The amount of water we went through was eye opening
Truly frightening
While I agree an EMP attack is a possibility that should be planned for, some of this stuff is a little over the top.
I think it would take about 15 minutes for people to figure out how to pump gas without electronics, for example (even less if you’ve got a redneck around).
And much of the actual ‘circuitry’ involved in our water distribution system (and similar systems) is indoors, to protect it from the elements. Often times, ‘indoors’ means inside a metal building. And even inside the building, much of the circuitry is inside a metal box - there is an entire industry built around these boxes.
Yes it would be a very bad event...90 million dead? Doubtful.
Found this: http://www.futurescience.com/emp/test184.html. You can see there were infrastructure damages in those tests. Not much at all in the way of human casualties, but there was noted grid damage - one test took out a 600-mile long electrical transmission cable.
There is no doubt an EMP can cause damage, how much is up to debate. But if it is harmed too badly, some things will come to a screeching halt. When those things stop is when we start losing people.
The way I read Metcalf was that it was a “proof of concept” trial run. One scenario I find plausible, among many. An Iranian specops leader in Teheran says, “We are spending billions on developing ICBMs and nuclear warheads. For a few million, my commandos can cause just as much harm to the USA, and they can be ready now, not years from now.”
So he’s ordered to provide a “proof of concept” test before his department’s budgets is increased 1,000% (still a tiny fraction of their ICBM and nuclear program budget).
Metcalf is the result, he gets his budget increase.
Foreign exchange students would be the logical channel for placing commandos in the USA. Long-term sleeper agents have proven unreliable over the decades. They “go native,” marry locals, begin to like their assigned city or town.
Not so “foreign exchange students” who can be brought back for polygraphs, supplementary training and brainwashing refreshers. For a year or two, their reliability will be close to 100%, compared to long term sleepers, who often disappear or flip to the FBI.
If Iran is spending millions for ICBMs and nukes, you don’t think they’d spend millions on a kinetic plan to take out our grid? Also the Chinese, Norks, Russians etc, but my money in on the Iranians primarily.
It defies logic to assume they don’t have commando teams all over the USA in the guise of “foreign students.” Naivete on the level of pre-Pearl Harbor 1941, Korea 1950, or NYC pre 9-11-2001.
Yes but that isn’t a wholesale destruction of the grid. EMP is very specific.
Granted, if the Orcs lose their cell phones, there could cause a riot.
Yes but how are you going to get the free government water delivered to people? Remember, we are talking about people who get trapped on escalators here. If the lights go out, they start looting. It’s not that they want to loot. It’s the LAW.
To be honest that’s not my concern. They make it sound like it’s the end of the world when in reality things will be up and running again. These things will not just disappear for piss sake. Most of what mankind actually needs will be back up in days.
Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.