Posted on 05/13/2021 5:27:42 PM PDT by Roman_War_Criminal
Our enemies now understand that you can completely paralyze America by taking out just a handful of pipelines. Even though all of us knew that any gasoline shortages were just going to be temporary, the shut down of the Colonial Pipeline caused a frenzied wave of “panic buying” all along the east coast. But if something caused the gasoline to stop flowing for a longer period of time, not being able to fill up our vehicles would be among the least of our problems. Trucks need gasoline too, and if our trucks stopped running for an extended period it would virtually paralyze every part of our society. Most Americans don’t realize this, but we are completely and utterly dependent on our truckers. Without them, our way of life would quickly cease to exist. We hardly ever hear anyone give recognition to the hard working truck drivers that are cruising up and down our highways day after day, but the truth is that they are absolutely critical to our success as a nation.
Prior to this month, most Americans couldn’t have even imagined a scenario in which all of our trucks suddenly stopped running, but the cyberattack against the Colonial Pipeline has exposed how deeply vulnerable our most sensitive infrastructure really is.
According to the American Petroleum Institute, there are more than 190,000 miles of pipelines that carry liquid petroleum in the United States…
More than 190,000 miles of liquid petroleum pipelines traverse the United States. They connect producing areas to refineries and chemical plants while delivering the products American consumers and businesses need. Pipelines are safe, efficient and, because most are buried, largely unseen. They move crude oil from oil fields on land and offshore to refineries where it is turned into fuels and other products, then from the refineries to terminals where fuels are trucked to retail outlets. Pipelines operate 24 hours a day, seven days a week.
Normally, we don’t think about these exceedingly important pipelines, but now we have seen what can happen when a single one of them is shut down for a few days.
The Colonial Pipeline is one of the most important pipelines in the entire country. According to the New York Times, it “can carry roughly three million barrels of fuel a day”…
The Colonial Pipeline, based in Alpharetta, Ga., is one of the largest in the United States. It can carry roughly three million barrels of fuel a day over 5,500 miles from Houston to New York. It serves most of the Southern states, and branches from the Atlantic Coast to Tennessee.
Some of the biggest oil companies, including Phillips Petroleum, Sinclair Pipeline and Continental Oil, joined to begin construction of the pipeline in 1961. It was a time of rapid growth in highway driving and long-distance air travel. Today Colonial Pipeline is owned by Royal Dutch Shell, Koch Industries and several foreign and domestic investment firms.
Without the Colonial Pipeline in operation, things got really crazy quite quickly. More than 10,000 gas stations were completely out of gasoline on Wednesday, and there was widespread panic in major southeastern cities such as Atlanta.
So what would happen if the gas stations had no gasoline for weeks or months?
Can you imagine what our society would look like?
There are several ways that such a possible scenario could unfold. Now that our enemies have seen the chaos that a cyberattack can cause, they could potentially try to hit multiple pipelines with cyberattacks simultaneously. Or they could try to knock out multiple pipelines all at once by using explosives. There is no way that we could possibly protect 190,000 miles of liquid petroleum pipelines, and so they would be very easy targets to strike.
A massive solar storm is another potential danger. An electromagnetic pulse that is large enough could fry electronics from coast to coast. Experts have been warning about this for many years, but very little has been done to harden our electrical grid.
Scientists tell us that there have been many such solar storms before, and they also assure us that it is just a matter of time before the next one comes along. Here in the United States, the largest geomagnetic storm currently on record happened in 1859…
The Carrington Event[1] was a powerful geomagnetic storm on September 1–2, 1859, during solar cycle 10 (1855–1867). A solar coronal mass ejection (CME) hit Earth’s magnetosphere and induced the largest geomagnetic storm on record. The associated “white light flare” in the solar photosphere was observed and recorded by British astronomers Richard Carrington and Richard Hodgson. The storm caused strong auroral displays and wrought havoc with telegraph systems. The now-standard unique IAU identifier for this flare is SOL1859-09-01.
A solar storm of this magnitude occurring today would cause widespread electrical disruptions, blackouts, and damage due to extended outages of the electrical grid.[2][3] The solar storm of 2012 was of similar magnitude, but it passed Earth’s orbit without striking the planet, missing by nine days.
These are just a few of the scenarios that could cause our gasoline to stop flowing for an extended period of time.
And if the gasoline stops flowing, our trucks stop running.
Alice Friedemann is a transportation expert that has been sounding the alarm about what this would mean for our country…
Within a week, in roughly this order, grocery stores would be out of dairy and other items that are delivered many times a day. And by the week, the shelves would be empty.
Hospitals, pharmacies, factories, and many other businesses also get several deliveries a day, and they’d be running out of stuff the first day.
And the second day, there’s be panic and hoarding. And restaurants, pharmacies would close. ATM’s would be out of money. Construction would stop. There’d be increasing layoffs. Increasing enormous amounts of trash not getting picked up, 685,000 tons a day. Service stations would be closed. Very few people would be working. And the livestock would start to be hungry from lack of feed deliveries.
Then within two weeks, clean water supplies would run out. Within four weeks to eight weeks, there wouldn’t be coal delivered to power plants and electricity would start shutting down. And when that happened, about a quarter of our pipelines use electricity, and so natural gas plants wouldn’t be fed natural gas and they’d start shutting down.
Basically, our society would descend into complete and utter chaos.
Don’t think that it can’t happen, because it most certainly can. The nightmare that we witnessed in Texas earlier this year showed us how vulnerable our power grids are, and now we have seen how vulnerable our pipelines are.
Our infrastructure has been neglected for decades, and now it is crumbling all around us.
And every time our infrastructure experiences some sort of a catastrophic failure, millions of Americans are deeply affected.
Soon this temporary gasoline shortage will be over, but please take it as a warning.
We are far more vulnerable than most Americans ever realized, and it is just a matter of time before our enemies decide to take advantage of that fact.
By Larry Niven and Jerry Pournelle is another one to read.
It's a quick read in one sitting as it's a real page turner.
- In the acknowledgements section at the beginning of his post-apocalyptic novel One Second After (2009), William R. Forstchen credits Alas, Babylon as an influence in writing his novel about the small town of Black Mountain, North Carolina.[8] The novel is set in a time after numerous electromagnetic pulses strike around the world, cutting off all sources of electricity to the town, and depicts the ensuing aftermath of sociological breakdown.
Hint: When I was little I saw that it grew best along the fence of our hog lot.
This guy has been around the block a few times. He must know that our enemies have known our vulnerabilities on an ongoing basis through the decades. If he is that ignorant I don't have any use for him.
Thanks for the link to Alas Babylon.
I read it back in high school, close to 50 years ago and have not been able to find it since then.
A friend recommended reading it as part of a sort of informal trilogy followed by On the Beach, and then The Chyrsalids by John Wyndham.
There are many out there who are listening. Let me just say I did not have an issue last year when there was no toilet paper on the shelves.
But it is time to start preparing for what could be a much longer problem.
You are correct. We used to live in Youngsville and Lafayette, just west of the swamp. Drove over it (beautiful) frequently on I-10.
My wife is a Ragin’ Cajun.
You from Cajun country?
Black Mountain,NC (been there) is a short distance from our mountain property.
The story hit me hard as well since his daughters and mine share the same names.
Easy to deeply, personally insert yourself into the story of that book.
Read both.
One Second After led me to Alas Babylon.
Our family clarion call if TSHTF is “Alas Babylon” sent three times in a row.
This used to FREE Republic, now it is more like FEAR Republic.
I made a couple of modifications on my V-10 Dodge so can drive 1,200 miles on a fill.
Yea, but does the truck have a bed left or is it just a rolling gas tank?
You confuse fear with preparedness.
Don’t go knocking on any doors when it hits would be my advice.
How are you able to accomplish what Government has already decided you cannot have? That would be more than a ninety day supply of your favorite prescription medication.
By cheating on the amount taken it is possible over time to increase the supply, or you probably can arrange with a sympathetic physician for an initial supply larger than needed or the dosage could be claimed larger than actually needed, which would mean the physician is putting his career at risk. As you are or should be well aware pharmacies are interconnected nationwide, and are fully aware of individuals and their prescriptions.
“Our enemies now understand that you can completely paralyze America by taking out just a handful of pipelines.”
Pshaw! Just convince them that a flu that has a 98% survival rate is gonna kill them! That has shut ‘em down and trashed their economy for 14+ months so far!
“I wonder what happened to the gas in the plastic bags?”
Cop haters, BLM & Antifa pukes are having joint ‘Fire Sales’ this upcoming summer. ;)
It’s not that complicated unless you got some highly expensive medication. I simply ask my doctor to write a 3 month supply for prescription which is the maximum allowed to be filled at one time here by the state.
Fortunately with a Sam’s Plus Membership my particular heart medicine is $30 a month. I pay cash for the medicine. The state does not restrict me coming back and refilling it. In other words I could fill it one week and come back in 3 weeks and fill it again. As long as I’m paying cash and it’s not a controlled substance. Once I got to a 15-month supply I just fill it every 3 months as regular to maintain that same Supply.
If you enjoyed the toilet paper shortage you will love a trucking halt.
I sense a strong normalacy bias here.
Discussing prepping in the event of a very feasible scenario, especially these days, is not fear. It’s wisdom.
Do you actually trust the government?
The appropriate word here is SNAFU.
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