Posted on 03/28/2014 11:49:45 AM PDT by Svartalfiar
Within a year, nine out of 10 Americans could be dead. And whatever causes the national apocalypse—be it North Korean malice or the whims of the sun—the downfall will ultimately be our own fault.
That's the fear of Newt Gingrich and other members of a high-profile coalition who are convinced that our fragile electrical grid could be wiped out at any moment.
Their concern? Electromagnetic pulses, the short bursts of energy—caused by anything from a nuclear blast to a solar flare—that can wreak havoc on electrical systems on a massive scale. And the coalition believes it's coming soon.
(Excerpt) Read more at nationaljournal.com ...
Water?
/S
The sun has been doing this kind of stuff for a very long time. The trouble is ... that we haven’t had some of the more serious “hits” from the sun, as we’ve had in the past in North America and when people lived here in historical times. Back then when it happened, it was a non-event, except for the glowing lights in the sky. Now, it’s the infrastructure of society that is in danger and it’s “that collapse” which would be the problem.
It’s happened before, but we didn’t have today’s infrastructure.
Thank You ... Am normally wrong and am then corrected. One question ... if the substations remained above ground with a breaker to trip at the first sign of a surge would that help the situation?
These contemplated scenarios could easily lead to 1 billion deaths or more from a catastrophic event. Something at that scale hasn't happened since the Flood. But that scale is explicitly laid out in the Book of Revelation near the beginning of the tribulation. One of the first shots over the bow in the tribulation will be the deaths of 1.75 billion people (at today's population) (Rev 6:8) not too long after that, another 1.75 billion people gone (Rev 9:15).
Not nearly at the scale contemplated here - around 1 billion deaths if you add up the whole world from a catastrophic event. That is an apocalyptic/tribulation event.
A lot of things have been going on for a long time including meteor showers. The issue here is how many deaths are contemplated from the event regardless of its effect in the past. When you start talking about 1 billion + deaths from the event, you’re talking apocalyptic/tribulation stuff.
I figured this would be about the Ebola Virus. Current outbread is resulting in 90% mortality. I think I read that a case has been found in Canada, and there is no vaccine or known cure.
Yeah, the alt WWII stuff is increasingly leaving me flat. I don’t even bother to page through the new Turtledove stuff anymore.
The Birmingham “Axis of Time” trilogy started ok, had a great second book (allegedly heavily edited by Eric Flint of the 1632 series) and then sputtered to death in book 3. His first two “After America” books were pretty good, but the third really sucked. Guy just doesn’t know how to lay out a multibook series in a way that’s consistent and brings it to an effective/coherent conclusion.
While the rest of us are trying to learn about EMP effects, couldn’t you take your religious zealotry to the religion page?
The military has been preparing for this for generations, it is a part of the modern age and electronics.
As I said there are a great many times in the history of man that catastrophic events have occured that seemed to be the end such as the Black Death which killed 1/4-1/2 of the earth’s population. As for me no mater how bad the scenario I would never presume to call it God’s Tribulation.
If we had as little as 30 minutes warning, the operators might be able to cut their interrupters, but many super-high-voltage transformers at power stations cannot be disconnected... so they'd pop. There is one last American manufacturer of transformers, but alas, there are no spares in place at most power plants, so it's lights out for 18 months or so until the transformers could be replaced.
It's a grim scenario.
It would be better, honestly, for the Feds to laser or kinetic-kill any missile gaining altitude over the continent, and risk spewing radioactive junk all over the landscape, than to allow any nuclear weapon to be exploded at high altitude in our airspace. You can't treat radiation sickness if you have no hospitals with power, and all the doctors are gone because they are protecting their families from looters in the vast, long dark.
Nothing wrong with preparation. Something wrong with panic. Faith has a lot to do with these end-time situations we face. I think that’s all I’ll say to you about this.
Or one big solar flare.
Why? What'd he do?
;^)
Sounds Greek to me!
That brings to mind those two orbitals (there is knowledge of) following north / south routes out of n. korea. Thank You for your input.
Also, it does NOT take a fusion warhead to create a massive high-altitude EMP powerful enough to destroy the power grid.
There is nothing special about the fusion warhead that generates the Compton effect; all you need is a massive gamma source, with a well-defined particle density, at the proper alitude so that the geomagnetic field can interact with the Compton currents. With engineering of the bomb casing (e.g., a uranium tamper), this can be done with a conventional fission bomb, albeit a large one. With a SCUD missile, I think it is feasible for a non-state actor to EMP us, with a barge-launched stolen Russian compression-fission weapon.
Sorry to disagree, but I'm an electrical engineer who used to be in the electric power measurement industry, and I'm pretty well-read on EMP for my own preparedness purposes.
I’m a lot more skeptical of a CME or solar flare causing the kind of geomagnetic currents to take the whole grid down. We learned a lot from the 1993 blackout. Also, we have satellites around the Sun that can send us warning at the speed of light, a lot faster than any solar mass ejection would travel. In the worst case— a super-Carrington event—the grid can be shut down and saved.
If there is an event from the sun, comparable to what has happened historically in North America, there is NO HARM to human beings from the event itself. All that is going to happen from the “event” is a bunch of “ooohs” and “aaahs” from the people here in the USA, admiring the lights in the sky. THAT’s IT!
The PROBLEM comes into play from the collapse of the infrastructure, itself. We’re not talking about burning buildings or exploding buildings from that event. NOTHING like that will happen because of this “sun-event”.
What will happen is that there simply won’t be any electricity. You’ve been in a power outage before. Nothing big happens! You do all right, and you wait, and the power comes back on.
We’ve even waited for a WEEK with no power and in the middle of the winter and absolutely freezing weather. We STILL DID OKAY!
The problem happens when there no power for an extended period of time and over the entire country - not just a limited region. And when that power outage continues for a year — THEN — you’ll find about 90% of the population of the USA dying off. That’s the kind of thing we’re talking about.
In addition, you’ll find that places like Pakistan doing okay. Saudi Arabia won’t have a problem. Yemen will do just as well as it’s doing right now. And you’ll find many other country doing okay - except for the “vacuum” created by the USA being missing.
We don’t have to be talking about the Tribulation of the Bible, you see.
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