BLACKOUT USA – A REAL LIFE NIGHTMARE NEARER THAN YOU THINK

Wednesday, June 8, 2016
By Paul Martin

by JAMES COLE
PrepperFortress.com
JUNE 8, 2016

Four days before Halloween, on Sunday morning, October 27, 2013, terrorists in Mexico’s Michoacan state blacked out the electric grid, leaving some 420,000 powerless and thirteen dead. That same Sunday night, National Geographic aired the docudrama American Blackout. This fictionalized account of a cyber attack on the electric grid depicts some of the horrific consequences of a nationwide blackout lasting 10 days:

People get trapped in elevators and become virtual prisoners in their high-rise apartment buildings. Gasoline is rationed to the military and hospitals, so the average American has no transportation–except for his legs. Food and water become so scarce that there is a life and death struggle over a can of peaches. Before day 10 of the blackout, society starts breaking down into anarchy as gangs and vigilante groups run wild.One of the heroes of the docudrama, a survivalist who is prepared for anything and does everything right, except for one seemingly small and humane mistake, is about to have his throat cut, when electric power, and civilization, suddenly returns on day 10.

National Geographic is to be applauded for American Blackout which is essentially a training film to educate the American people about the very real threat posed to their lives by a cyber attack on the electric grid. If there is any fault or unrealism in the docudrama, it is that the blackout lasts only 10 days, and recovery is achieved so quickly.

In real life, terrorists or rogue states would probably not limit their attack on the nation’s electric grid to computer viruses or hacking, as implied in the docudrama. They would also use other more destructive means–that could cause a protracted national blackout lasting months or years.

Moreover, Mother Nature can inflict a potentially protracted national blackout. Regardless of how one weighs the threat to the national grid from terrorists or rogue states–the Sun will, sooner or later, hurl toward the Earth a geomagnetic super-storm, with catastrophic consequences for the national electric grid.

The Sun–The Inevitable Cyber Threat

Solar flares, technically called coronal mass ejections, regularly collide with the Earth’s magnetosphere and generate geomagnetic storms that can damage electric grids by means of a natural electromagnetic pulse (EMP). Geomagnetic storms happen every year and normally affect nations at high northern latitudes, such as Canada, Norway, Sweden, Finland, and Russia.

In 1989 a geomagnetic storm, called the Hydro-Quebec Storm, blacked out eastern Canada for a day, causing billions of dollars in economic losses.

The Congressional EMP Commission and National Academy of Sciences warns that, every century or so, the Sun hits the Earth with a coronal mass ejection of such power that it generates a geomagnetic super-storm, like the 1859 Carrington Event. In 1859, the Carrington Event damaged the primitive electronics of the time worldwide. Fires broke out in telegraph stations. Telegraph cables burst into flames causing forest fires. So powerful was the EMP that it penetrated miles down through the depths of the Atlantic Ocean and burned out the just laid telegraph cable linking North America to Europe.

Electricity was still a novelty in 1859, and in those horse and buggy days not vital to survival of civilization. However, if a Carrington Event recurred today, it would crash electric grids and critical infrastructures worldwide, and put at risk the lives of billions.

The Rest…HERE

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