On Oct. 26, 2010, NASA at www.nasa.gov, reported “Every hundred years or so, a solar storm comes along so potent it fills the skies of Earth with blood-red auroras, makes compass needles point in the wrong direction, and sends electric currents coursing through the planet’s topsoil. The most famous such storm, the Carrington Event of 1859, actually shocked telegraph operators and set some of their offices on fire. A 2008 report by the National Academy of Sciences warns that if such a storm occurred today, we could experience widespread power blackouts with permanent damage to many key transformers.”
“It’s among the greatest threats facing America today,” U.S. Rep. Trent Franksr, R-Arizona, elected to the House in 2003, stated bluntly in a Fox News report dated June 18, 2013, “A large enough (electromagnetic pulse, known as EMP,) could destroy the electric grid, notably the rare and very expensive transformers that form the grid’s backbone. Without them and the power they deliver, a vast swath of American technology and every system that relies upon it would go dark for months or even years, some fear ”“ essentially sending the country back to the stone age.”
“And we’re utterly unprepared for this potentially catastrophic threat,” added Frank Gaffney, president of the Center for Security Policy and former assistant secretary of defense under Ronald Reagan, “A pre-industrial society, which is what we would be reduced to, would not have the ability to sustain itself as we do today. Think of people in cities with no access to food or water, no sewage, no access to transport to get out of there ”¦ those become dead zones in a matter of weeks or at most months. It’s really grim,” Gaffney told FoxNews.com.
To address this threat, Rep. Franks and former House Speaker Newt Gingrich introduced a bill on June 18, 2013, to protect the grid, the SHIELD Act or H.R. 2417: Secure High-voltage Infrastructure for Electricity from Lethal Damage, which would amend the Federal Power Act to protect the bulk-power system and electric infrastructure critical to the defense and well-being of the United States against natural and manmade EMP threats and vulnerabilities. The bill would push the federal government to install grid-saving devices or surge protectors that could save the transformers and power system from EMPs. SHIELD would empower the U.S. Federal Energy Regulatory Commission to require the electric power industry to protect the national grid from EMPs.
Complicating the threat of solar storms to the power grid is the additional threat of a cyber attack by China, Russia, North Korea, and other foreign counties with sophisticated computer hackers capable of interfering with computer systems that control the power grid or the denotation of a small nuclear device on a long-range missile by a hostile country high above the midwestern section of the United States, which could generate an electromagnetic pulse strong enough to shut down the entire power grid.
According to www.politico.com, former U.S. Rep. Roscoe Bartlett a Republican who represented the sixth Congressional District, 1993 to 2003and a former Navy engineer who had worked on the space race, once recounted a conversation he claimed to have had with unnamed Russian officials about how they could take out the United States: “They would ”˜detonate a nuclear weapon high above your country,’” he recalled them saying, “”˜and shut down your power grid ”“ and your communications ”“ for six months or so.’”
Just how bad is it? According to the website, www.shieldact.com, “In 2008, the bipartisan Electromagnetic Pulse Commission testified before Congress that contemporary U.S. society is not structured, nor does it have the means, to provide for the needs of nearly 300 million Americans without electricity.”
Technology, such as solar panels, windmills, and even homemade biodiesel fuel for power generators have enabled some people to become energy independent. Those few people, or “preppers” as they are commonly known, who are truly prepared for a catastrophe of this magnitude with stores of canned goods, the ability to live off the land, including gathering firewood to start a fire with or without matches, and provide shelter for themselves against the elements will fare much better that the general public, but will still be subject to random looting, the indiscriminate use of firearms, and the general deterioration of society as law and order breaks down during a prolonged blackout.
Think about the recent cold snap a few weeks ago … where would we all go? What would we do? The shelves of the grocery stores would be empty in a few days. ATMs and gas pumps would no longer work. There would be no escape from the numbing cold. Some suggest that we could travel south, but people would quickly run out of gas and traffic on the highways would soon come to a standstill as fleeing people tried to escape the bitter cold. It would be a disaster on an unprecedented scale. Countless numbers of people would die.
Pray that it doesn’t happen in the winter. The fix for this looming disaster waiting to happen is entirely within the realm of possibility, but it takes money estimated at around $2 billion, something that in this country of uncontrolled spending, special interests, and government waste does not come easily. It seems like there is never enough money to pay for improving our early warning advance systems for tsunamis, earthquake prepararedness, missile defense systems for nuclear attack and/or asteroid protection, and now strengthening the power grid. Since the alternative is unthinkable, we need to petition our elected representatives to pass the SHIELD Act, now languishing in two separate committees, the Energy and Commerce Committee, and the Budget Committee, to prevent the catastrophic collapse of the power grid. It is an important first step for if we do nothing, it is entirely possible that our country as we know it today will no longer exist.
— Val Philbrick works in the production department of the Journal Tribune as a pre-press person. She is a member of PETA and the Humane Society of the United States.
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