Posted on 09/25/2011 1:30:34 PM PDT by IbJensen
If you rely on certain meds—forget about it. I’d rather go fast then slow.
When you’re a certain age starting a family, you want to live close to a school. When your 70+ you want to live close to a hospital.
Government “help” should be very limited at least to the individual.
My great grandmother told me about a late spring blizzard and ice storm that hit about a century ago. Roofs and barns were collapsed all over the place. All the roads were closed with 6 feet of snow and trees down due to the ice. She said her father built a temporary lean to for the surviving animals. Mules and pulling ponies from the community were stabled together while they cleared the roads. She said every house had more than one family living in them for months.
She said there was some “state militia” help for big jobs but nothing in the small farming communities. They survived and rebuilt.
There’s some Amish about 10 miles up the road that do ok.
You hit our societal crisis on the head!
The riots and serious looting by the gimmes would devastate America as the ‘authorities’ would stand dumbly by watching and video taping the carnage.
America’s large problem is that we have a huge underclass of population who have never heard of the Ten Commandments and are, therefore, incapable of proper behavior. They are simply welfare whores and crooks!
I’m sure our government worthies will take care of us. After all, we pay their fat salaries... /s/
I’ve worked in the utility industry for 25 years. I started as a power plant electrician and moved into instrument & controls and now I work with SCADA systems. Over that quarter century, we have automated everything we can to reduce labor costs. We have switched from analog controls to digital controls to reduce labor costs. We have moved from heavy-duty electronics to micro-electronics to cut costs and again to reduce labor costs.
We can run a utility with 10% of the people we needed 25 years ago. The risk is that an EMP or cyber attack can knock us back to the 1800s because we don’t even have the people trained to get us back online without the easily programmed and replaced digital control systems.
When we faced the mega-hoax of Y2K, we were barely ready. We used every person we had to be standing by when the clocks rolled over, and if the worst-case scenario had happened (which no one believed it would, but the FedGov made us “prepare” anyway), we could have operated the utility without computers.
But that was 11 years ago. We have half the people working in the power plants, electric grids, and water/wastewater systems now as we did then and the reliance on cheap, digital controls is about 10x what it was in 1999.
The key to the EMP scare is that it requires detonating a large thermonucler warhead high over the USA and our Ohio-class SSBNs are hardened against EMP. Using that weapon is an act of nuclear war and we have procedures in place for that and those procedures involve the Ohio-class SSBNs. A towelhead with a suitcase nuke is not going to be able to make this attack a reality. Only a few nations could pull this off and they’ve had nukes for many years, but we’ve stared each other down for a long time without any mushroom clouds.
As long as they don't canx the Nascar races, I'm good.
:)
Thanks. Interesting read.
Practice with your shooting irons, maybe buy a few night vision devices, and ally yourself with enough other adults that you completely trust so that you can guard and defend yourselves 24/7. Zombies will be headed your way.
Ping
This is merely giving our multitudinous enemies some clever ideas.
North Korea and Iran are chomping at the bit with this one... the time to fix the grid is now...
Iran has placed satellites in orbit.
Neither does this old 6x6 that a relative of mine has sitting around. I drove it a little recently:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wIbRlsBH0Qk
More than half of the US population would be wiped-out after more than 12 hours without news about the Kardasians.
Well, come to think of it, that might actually be a good thing.
“Seems highly unlikely. EMP would not destroy the entire infrastructure, just the local area”
Yeah, I think the threat from EMP is sometimes overblown.
Long haul internet lines are generally fiber optic, and immune to EMP.
On the other hand, not many vehicles will start today without their ECU. Even diesels.
Does anyone here (other than doomsday scare type people) have any real data on the threat radius from the best EMP burst thus far?
Seems highly unlikely. EMP would not destroy the entire infrastructure, just the local area.With a decent-sized nuclear warhead, it would effect everything in line-of-sight of the explosion. The Starfish Prime test over the Pacific, did considerable damage in Hawaii, 800 miles away from the spot under the explosion (and that was before microelectronics came in to common use).
A 100KT bomb about 200 miles above Kansas would cover the entire continental United States.
Here is a good summary of the EMP effects from nuclear bombs.
We discovered the phenomenon during our weapons testing in the Pacific 60 years ago.
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