Zero Hour: The Day The Grid Stood Still
There are several causal factors, natural and manmade, that could bring out modern grid to a stand-still, arguing for the need for distributed, hardened power. Disruption could come from electromagnetic pulse (EMP) from a military nuclear detonation, or it could come from a coronal mass ejection (CME) from the sun.
| Introducing this article, Jeane Manning writes: "With her connections in the Washington DC beltway and among cutting-edge science researchers, screenwriter Nora Maccoby-Hathaway has an insider's knowledge of what society might face in the near future." |
Sterling's note.
Today our power was out for nearly six hours. It was also out for an expended period at some point during the last three days while we were away, as attested by some concentrated juice we found melted in our freezer. Other than that, we've not had a significant outage here since moving here last November.
I find it ironic that on this day that I was preparing this article for publication that this would happen to us. It certainly was disruptive, preventing normal activities, and causing us to take time to address bare survival needs such as starting up a wood stove and locating our flashlights and spare water, and firing up a generator. An omen? |
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by By Nora Maccoby-Hathaway
T-minus 7 Days:
Army MAJ Tom Calhoun is testing the effects of an Electromagnetic Pulse (EMP) generator. The expected EMP level required to disable vehicles based on previous studies is 30-80 kV/m. His team elects to begin the testing at only 5 kV/m.
Driving a 2010 Toyota Prius through the path of the EMP generator pulse, the car dashboard immediately goes blank and the Prius creeps to a stop.
"That's what happens when you use smaller microchips and circuits," he reports. "Consider that our entire nation is dependent on computers for power and everything else, and we don't have any backup."
T-minus 3 Days:
Having workers go without pay for over six months, uprisings throughout Iran become widespread. Hundreds of thousands of workers take to the streets of Tehran alongside defecting Iranian Revolutionary Guard forces. The Iranian leadership holds an emergency meeting to determine what course of action remains at their disposal.
T-minus 2 Days:
An explosion rocks Haifa in the morning. Members of the Israeli leadership denounce the incident as a terrorist bomb. Police investigate the scene and interview eyewitnesses. Initial assessments have the body count at well over 100. By midday, several members of Israeli leadership officially announce that the explosion resulted from a missile strike originating from across the northern border of Israel. Israeli officials said the missile was a Syrian-produced model of a Iranian Fajr-3 with a 50 km range and can carry a 100 pound payload of high explosive and shrapnel, an enhanced capability compared to the smaller Katyusha rockets that Hezbollah had used during the 2006 Israel-Lebanon War. Israeli reserve and active duty forces are mobilized. In the evening, an unmanned Hezbollah aircraft attacks an Israeli warship off the coast of Beirut.
T-minus 1 Day:
Israel launches a counter-strike against Hezbollah forces in Lebanon. Hezbollah counters with a Scud missile strike against Israel's Dimona Reactor facility, forcing a reactor shutdown and evacuation. Israel recognizes the source of the Hezbollah-launched Scud missile as originating from the Syrian military and launches a limited nuclear strike against both Damascus and Beirut.
T-plus 0 Hours:
Families walking along the boardwalk at Rockaway Beach, in New York City, notice a disturbance in the sky. A little boy stops to point, "Look at the big flash in the sky, Mommy!"
"That's strange, the city usually holds its fireworks display tomorrow night. It seems so far away though," his mother observes.
His father makes a call on his cell phone to find out when the rest of the family will arrive. "Great…my phone just went dead. I charged it last night…go figure."
Slowly, people start to look around, perplexed, wondering where the silence is coming from. No noisy radios or televisions can be heard along the boardwalk from the outdoor cafes.
"Must be a power outage again…happened last month too," comments a passer-by as he licks his ice cream. "Should be back on in a few minutes."
T-plus 15 Minutes:
Wise EMP-protected HAM radio operators throughout the United States and Canada are reporting total power outages in their respective neighborhoods. The general consensus among them is quickly solidifying: a high-altitude nuclear weapon detonation knocked out the entire North American power grid, based on reported observations from dozens of HAM radio operators throughout North America.
T-plus 20 Minutes:
High-altitude nuclear strikes are launched by the "military-industrial complex" from satellites orbiting on the other side of the planet, in order to level the playing field by disabling all remaining power grids on the planet, as well as low Earth orbiting satellites.
In military terminology, an EMP bomb, detonated hundreds of kilometers above the earth's surface, is known as a high-altitude electromagnetic pulse (HEMP) device. Effects of a HEMP device depend on the altitude of the detonation, energy yield, interactions with the earth's magnetic field, and shielding of targets.
An electromagnetic pulse is a burst of electromagnetic radiation resulting from either a nuclear explosion or a solar coronal mass ejection (CME). A CME is an ejection of material from the solar corona. Either event would create a sudden, massive fluctuation in the Earth's electromagnetic field. The resulting electric and magnetic fields then couple with electrical grid systems to produce damaging current and voltage surges.
If world peace broke out tomorrow, we would still have CMEs to contend with over the next several years as Solar Cycle #24 approaches a solar maximum in the 2012-2013 timeframe. In March 1989, during the solar maximum of Solar Cycle #22, the Northeast U.S. and Eastern Canada experienced a minor geomagnetic storm which compromised the electrical grid throughout for hours.
The March 1989 event pales in comparison to the 'Carrington Event of 1859'. At 11:18 a.m. on September 1, 1859, 33-year old Richard Carrington was observing an 11-inch image of the sun on a screen and was drawing the sunspots he saw in the image. Suddenly, two beads of intense white light appeared over the sunspots. Within 60 seconds the light had significantly diminished, and within five minutes completely disappeared from the screen.
Just before dawn the next day, skies all over planet Earth erupted in red, green, and purple auroras so brilliant that newspapers could be read as easily as in daylight. Aurora borealis pulsated as far south as tropical latitudes over Cuba, the Bahamas, Jamaica, El Salvador, and Hawaii. The only equipment in place resembling today's electrical grid, telegraph systems worldwide went haywire. Spark discharges shocked telegraph operators and set the telegraph paper on fire. Even when telegraphers disconnected the batteries powering the lines, aurora-induced electric currents in the wires still allowed messages to be transmitted.
If such an event were to occur today, the impact on modern society would be absolutely catastrophic. Various official research establishments throughout the world have provided data on our solar system's largest celestial bodies to conclude the following:
- Recent solar activity highest in 8000 years
- Sun's magnetic field has decreased in size by 25%
- 300% increase in galactic dust entering our solar system
- Mercury's magnetosphere experiencing significant increases
- Venus exhibiting a 2500% increase in its "green glow"
- Mars showing a rapid appearance of clouds and ozone
- Mars observations reveal up to 50% erosion of its ice features within a 12-month period
- Jupiter plasma torus increasing; its moon Io exhibiting the same changes
- A 200% increase in the density of Io's plasma torus
- Jupiter's Disappearance of White Ovals since 1997 - recent increase in storms
- Io's ionosphere is ~1000% higher
- Jupiter's moon Europa much brighter than scientists expected
- Jupiter's moon Gannymede is 200% brighter
- Saturn's plasma torus is ~1000% denser
- Aurorae first seen in Saturn's polar regions in recent years
- Uranus was featureless in 1996 - exhibiting huge storms since 1999
- Uranus in 2004 was also markedly brighter than in 1999
- Neptune is 40% brighter in the near-infrared range based on observations from 1996 - 2002
- Pluto observations reveal a 300% increase in atmospheric pressure
These changes are not a result of Americans driving around SUVs, though gluttonous oil consumption remains a significant liability on numerous fronts (see: 80% fatality rate in theater of war + Fully Burdened Cost of Fuel: DSB Report 2009). Disruptions throughout the solar system suggest that Solar Cycle 24 will likely produce CMEs rivaling that of the 1859 Carrington Event.
While details remain classified, an incoming brown dwarf star several times the mass of Jupiter has been identified as the culprit disrupting the solar system's heliosphere, as well as celestial bodies throughout our solar system. The Large Binocular Telescope Near-infrared Utility with Camera and Integral Field Unit for Extragalactic Research (LUCIFER– see http://www.mpe.mpg.de/ir/lucifer/index.php) is a near-infrared camera and spectrograph that was installed in April 2010 on the world's largest optical Large Binocular Telescope (LBT) located on Mount Graham in southeastern Arizona.
Technicians install the LUCIFER instruments on the Large Binocular Telescope
LUCIFER has the capability to track the inbound brown dwarf star that can only be observed in the nearinfrared range. LUCIFER will provide real-time tracking data that will allow scientists to determine the exact location and trajectory of the brown dwarf star.
A 3-D Model of the LBT
Daniel Stolte, Science Writer at the University of Arizona, has recently published several relevant articles on brown dwarfs and related topics. He stated that from talking to researchers, he was not aware of a brown dwarf coming within the vicinity of our solar system any time soon.
Contrast that conclusion with Andrew Lloyd's web site (http://www.darkstar1.co.uk), outlining his theory on the dark star. When information of this magnitude remains classified, "proof" is normally hard to pin down, by design. http://projectcamelotportal.com has a video interview between Andrew Lloyd and Kerry Cassidy posted that provides additional information on brown dwarf stars. Other related whistleblower testimony is available through the Project Camelot Portal web site.
Depiction of a Brown Dwarf Star in our Solar System
So what exactly is causing all the commotion in the solar system – SUVs, an incoming brown dwarf, or something else? How much time is left until geopolitics in the Middle East deteriorates into a full-blown regional war that catastrophically impacts the industrialized nations? We must implement measures to protect the electrical power grid from a catastrophic EMP event. The electrical power grid affords us the luxury of an elevated standard of living within our modern civilization. Without it, we would collectively revert back to indigenous living within a matter of weeks.
Millions of dollars in protective measures prior to an EMP event would result in trillions of dollars in savings following an EMP event if such measures were properly implemented. If there were ever a time to initiate preemptive action, it would be now by protecting the grid through EMP hardening of critical electronic devices and equipment such as transformers. Without electricity, clean water, fresh food, liquid fuels for transportation, and the everyday comforts of modern living that people take for granted would no longer be available and/or accessible. Without intervention on a large scale to protect the electrical power grids, our modern civilization remains needlessly and utterly defenseless.
http://www.altenergy2012.com/The_Day_The_Grid_Stood_Still.pdf
