Thanks bro. Eased my mind a little.
“Thanks bro. Eased my mind a little.”
Did it ? Ok, lemme ruin it again then !
An EMP has no -personal- impact meaning that anything in your immediate vicinity would be inconvenienced and set aside for a few weeks for repairs. Your life would be pretty good. Your car would work (Maybe a check engine light or some electrical gremlins starting) but overall your house and generator would be ok.
But if that EMP - even a small one - were to hit any of the major electrical grid hubs in our country it would be a different story. It is proclaimed in general public (The military has remained tight-lipped on their supply levels) that hitting a power hub and allowing the damage to cascade would blow out transformers. These transformers would blow out to the tune of 10s of thousands.
And apparently, we don’t have enough to repair or replace them. And those that are available come from China. If we had a US source alone it would take years to repair the grid that was damaged. People will relocate from those areas as refugees. The migration would be enormous. Think 20 simultaneous Katrinas.
With work and productivity heavily damaged, the effect on our economy would be pretty quick. Again, within days food supplies, fuel supplies and energy transportation would be at a standstill. Now the entire county, while our lights may work, will experience the chaotic effects that the cinema promises - An entire nation at a standstill. Gridlocked.
Within days of even a believable EMP strike the US would stop pumping gas, stop shipping food from the farms inland and people would start to migrate on foot to areas of better weather. Could you imagine what today’s population south of the Mason-Dixon would do without even the -hope- of Air conditioning ?
So an EMP strike doesn’t give us the cinematic presentation of devastation, but it gives us another form of devastation. Our country is a delicate system where any interruption of this magnitude - even an EMP over a few key California targets - would cascade into an apocalypse on a grand scale.
It doesn’t take the whole country being involved in the radius of damage... just a surprising FEW parts of it. I mean, I moved away from CT strictly because I took a tour of Hunt’s Point gas and Indian Point. Those places are so full of security holes that I’m surprised they haven’t been hit yet.
And the Hudson river ! If someone were to find a credible bomb threat to any of the bridges that cross the hudson, other bridges would immediately be shut down. New England gets all of it’s food from across the hudson. NE doesn’t actually have producing farms - just show ones for the rich. New England would be lining up behind red cross trucks in 48 hours.
The whole damned thing is so delicate that every time I hear about Mexico losing some fissable material (13 cases since 2000 alone.. There are potentially 13 rogue batches of nuclear fissable material in the US right now.) I break out my preps and practice.