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Government Agency Warns If 9 Substations Are Destroyed, The Power Grid Could Be Down For 18 Months
Submitted by Michael Snyder of The Economic Collapse blog,
What would you do if the Internet or the power grid went down for over a year? Our key infrastructure, including the Internet and the power grid, is far more vulnerable than most people would dare to imagine. These days, most people simply take for granted that the lights will always be on and that the Internet will always function properly. But what if all that changed someday in the blink of an eye? According to the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission's latest report, all it would take to plunge the entire nation into darkness for more than a year would be to knock out a transformer manufacturer and just 9 of our 55,000 electrical substations on a really hot summer day. The reality of the matter is that our power grid is in desperate need of updating, and there is very little or no physical security at most of these substations.
If terrorists, or saboteurs, or special operations forces wanted to take down our power grid, it would not be very difficult. And as you will read about later in this article, the Internet is extremely vulnerable as well.
When I read the following statement from the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission's latest report, I was absolutely floored...
"Destroy nine interconnection substations and a transformer manufacturer and the entire United States grid would be down for at least 18 months, probably longer."
Wow.
What would you do without power for 18 months?
FERC studied what it would take to collapse the entire electrical grid from coast to coast. What they found was quite unsettling...
In its modeling, FERC studied what would happen if various combinations of substations were crippled in the three electrical systems that serve the contiguous U.S. The agency concluded the systems could go dark if as few as nine locations were knocked out: four in the East, three in the West and two in Texas, people with knowledge of the analysis said.
The actual number of locations that would have to be knocked out to spawn a massive blackout would vary depending on available generation resources, energy demand, which is highest on hot days, and other factors, experts said. Because it is difficult to build new transmission routes, existing big substations are becoming more crucial to handling electricity.
So what would life look like without any power for a long period of time? The following list comes from one of my previous articles...
-There would be no heat for your home.
-Water would no longer be pumped into most homes.
-Your computer would not work.
-There would be no Internet.
-Your phones would not work.
-There would be no television.
-There would be no radio.
-ATM machines would be shut down.
-There would be no banking.
-Your debit cards and credit cards would not work.
-Without electricity, gas stations would not be functioning.
-Most people would be unable to do their jobs without electricity and employment would collapse.
-Commerce would be brought to a standstill.
-Hospitals would not be able to function.
-You would quickly start running out of medicine.
-All refrigeration would shut down and frozen foods in our homes and supermarkets would start to go bad.
If you want to get an idea of how quickly society would descend into chaos, just watch the documentary "American Blackout" some time. It will chill you to your bones.
The truth is that we live in an unprecedented time. We have become extremely dependent on technology, and that technology could be stripped away from us in an instant.
Right now, our power grid is exceedingly vulnerable, and all the experts know this, but very little is being done to actually protect it...
"The power grid, built over many decades in a benign environment, now faces a range of threats it was never designed to survive," said Paul Stockton, a former assistant secretary of defense and president of risk-assessment firm Cloud Peak Analytics. "That's got to be the focus going forward."
If a group of agents working for a foreign government or a terrorist organization wanted to bring us to our knees, they could do it.
In fact, there have actually been recent attacks on some of our power stations. Here is just one example…
The Wall Street Journal’s Rebecca Smith reports that a former Federal Energy Regulatory Commission chairman is acknowledging for the first time that a group of snipers shot up a Silicon Valley substation for 19 minutes last year, knocking out 17 transformers before slipping away into the night.
The attack was “the most significant incident of domestic terrorism involving the grid that has ever occurred” in the U.S., Jon Wellinghoff, who was chairman of the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission at the time, told Smith.
Have you heard about that attack before now?
Most Americans have not.
But it should have been big news.
At the scene, authorities found "more than 100 fingerprint-free shell casings", and little piles of rocks "that appeared to have been left by an advance scout to tell the attackers where to get the best shots."
So what happens someday when the bad guys decide to conduct a coordinated attack against our power grid with heavy weapons?
It could happen.
In addition, as I mentioned at the top of this article, the Internet is extremely vulnerable as well.
For example, did you know that authorities are so freaked out about the security of the Internet that they have given "the keys to the Internet" to a very small group of individuals that meet four times per year?
It's true. The following is from a recent story posted by the Guardian...
The keyholders have been meeting four times a year, twice on the east coast of the US and twice here on the west, since 2010. Gaining access to their inner sanctum isn't easy, but last month I was invited along to watch the ceremony and meet some of the keyholders – a select group of security experts from around the world. All have long backgrounds in internet security and work for various international institutions. They were chosen for their geographical spread as well as their experience – no one country is allowed to have too many keyholders. They travel to the ceremony at their own, or their employer's, expense.
What these men and women control is the system at the heart of the web: the domain name system, or DNS. This is the internet's version of a telephone directory – a series of registers linking web addresses to a series of numbers, called IP addresses. Without these addresses, you would need to know a long sequence of numbers for every site you wanted to visit. To get to the Guardian, for instance, you'd have to enter "77.91.251.10" instead of theguardian.com.
If the system that controls those IP addresses gets hijacked or damaged, we would definitely need someone to press the "reset button" on the Internet.
Sadly, the hackers always seem to be several steps ahead of the authorities. In fact, according to one recent report, breaches of U.S. government computer networks go undetected 40 percent of the time…
A new report by Sen. Tom Coburn (R., Okla.) details widespread cybersecurity breaches in the federal government, despite billions in spending to secure the nation’s most sensitive information.
The report, released on Tuesday, found that approximately 40 percent of breaches go undetected, and highlighted “serious vulnerabilities in the government’s efforts to protect its own civilian computers and networks.”
“In the past few years, we have seen significant breaches in cybersecurity which could affect critical U.S. infrastructure,” the report said. “Data on the nation’s weakest dams, including those which could kill Americans if they failed, were stolen by a malicious intruder. Nuclear plants’ confidential cybersecurity plans have been left unprotected. Blueprints for the technology undergirding the New York Stock Exchange were exposed to hackers.”
Yikes.
And things are not much better when it comes to cybersecurity in the private sector either. According to Symantec, there was a 42 percent increase in cyberattacks against businesses in the United States last year. And according to a recent report in the Telegraph, our major banks are being hit with cyberattacks "every minute of every day"...
Every minute, of every hour, of every day, a major financial institution is under attack.
Threats range from teenagers in their bedrooms engaging in adolescent “hacktivism”, to sophisticated criminal gangs and state-sponsored terrorists attempting everything from extortion to industrial espionage. Though the details of these crimes remain scant, cyber security experts are clear that behind-the-scenes online attacks have already had far reaching consequences for banks and the financial markets.
For much more on all of this, please see my previous article entitled "Big Banks Are Being Hit With Cyberattacks 'Every Minute Of Every Day'".
Up until now, attacks on our infrastructure have not caused any significant interruptions in our lifestyles.
But at some point that will change.
Are you prepared for that to happen?
We live at a time when our world is becoming increasingly unstable. In the years ahead it is quite likely that we will see massive economic problems, major natural disasters, serious terror attacks and war. Any one of those could cause substantial disruptions in the way that we live.
At this point, even NASA is warning that "civilization could collapse"...
A new study sponsored by Nasa's Goddard Space Flight Center has highlighted the prospect that global industrial civilisation could collapse in coming decades due to unsustainable resource exploitation and increasingly unequal wealth distribution.
Noting that warnings of 'collapse' are often seen to be fringe or controversial, the study attempts to make sense of compelling historical data showing that "the process of rise-and-collapse is actually a recurrent cycle found throughout history." Cases of severe civilisational disruption due to "precipitous collapse - often lasting centuries - have been quite common."
So let us hope for the best.
But let us also prepare for the worst.
»
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In line protection terms it was not "overload". It was over reaching zone 3 and 4 distance relay settings and they were set too sensitively. NERC has come out with a whole new set of standards and guidlines for setting these relays so as not to repeat this situation. I've worked directly with these NERC standards and they have been applied nationwide to the grid as a result of that NE cascading outage.
Oh, that's relieving. Now I have so much more faith an actual overload won't happen since the relays are now less sensitive.
The faster I'm off-grid 100% the better. I already rely on on-grid power much less. My computer may use it but I don't rely on it for survival.
Fuel's the way to go, not a need to plug in power sources, just have ignition sources handy.
The absurdity of this wired grid is annoying.
Would be nice to see bloomboxes pop up everywhere considering we certainly have enough sewage & landfill to siphon off methane.
There was a study that estimated that up to 90 percent of the population would die if we lost power for a year.
This would not be a walk in the park.
I am gonna be nice to laws of physics. Maybe they want a doctor with body armor with plenty of weapons and ammo and food for a year to join his coop lol
I know my family won't survive it alone. In India during periodic starvations when the population observed a family not looking emaciated they would destroy that family in search of their food stash. I can't hold off 500 people who will burn me out and kill my family if I don't give up my food.
A well entrenched group in a defensible perimeter would have no problem. Siege warfare only works if the attackers don't starve first lol.
LOP I can trap too. When all the game animals are hunted to extinction there will still be plenty of birds and mammalian omnivores lol. Meat is not a problem for me.
Just don't eat the brains or anything out of the nervous system, and cook thoroughly. I mean really well done.
Have you never seen walking dead?
If that's how people will be then you lay traps with food in them & those traps must be loud, gruesome & a good warning that anyone else raiding for food, burning and killing, will get killed first.
Need moar taxes
Here let me help you out with that....
http://lmgtfy.com/?q=electromagnetic+pulse
Thanks for the tip.
Back to typewriters and US Mail.
That would suck, but that's how I did it 30 years ago.
Fear sells. Government sponsored fear, sells even better.
Thank the baby Jesus flight 370 won't be able to crash into them all @ once. Or is it delivering a EMP?
this post along with comments is great .. best chuckle all day
If all this was true, don't ya think Dicki Cheney and his crew would have been there and done that?
What morons. Granted, we would work around it in weeks, if not days.
Still, in the past, this would have got jail time for releasing this information. Can't find out about ObamaCare payments or the NSA, but heck, want to destroy society...no problem.
If a large number of stations went down together there would be no quick workarounds, that's the whole point. Any one or two, yeah maybe.
When a massive long-duration blackout happens, if it's sabotage and if it's not done by an agent of a country we're actually at war with. I'll bet an FBI or CIA agent sets up the action - and sets up the bust. And then Congress races to give away more of our freedoms to keep it from happening again! Almost all the terrorist attacks that have been exposed since 2001 have been sting operations. The Marathon Bombers may have been an exception ... but I doubt it. (See: http://tv.globalresearch.ca/2013/04/american-terror-manufactured-fbi)
But it sure sounds like this is an accident waiting to happen anyway, and the longer we wait the more certainly it will happen!
If we as a country are serious about preventing this catastrophe we'll spend what it takes to rebuild our grid on sound principles. And while we're at it, to rebuild our antiquated leaky gas transmission systems which are causing an explosion somewhere or other in America every day. And rebuild our sewer and water and dams and bridges and tunnels and railroads and the whole damn Interstate Highway system that's falling apart! There's plenty of money sloshing around doing no one any good that we can capture and put to work, and there's plenty of folks who urgently need a good job.
I don't expect to get all +1's for this comment, but it's the truth and no amount of huffing and moralizing about how the government needs to stay out of the economy will restart it - or fix the grid.
It should be clear by now that this economy is not going to restart itself.
I'm going to set this juicy hamburger right here Fido. Now don't touch it.....
Massive job creation stimulus project that will create hundreds of thousands of jobs. Bury every single power line, Cable tv ect. in the Country underground and get rid of all above ground utilities. Massive public works project that could take years to complete.
Let me guess, they will be destroyed...
NASA should go back to making Muslims feel good.
NASA should go back to making Muslims feel good.
You don't own space, NAYSAW does!
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mF7vt-c2N1g
Government Agency Warns some kind of national security threat, oh oh, better crawl under my desk.
So the poiticians get martial law and terrorists take the blame for an CIA op. Winning.
Queue up the "Alamo fantasies", shotgun triggers rigged up with fishing line, and rabid fans of "The Road".
What would you do if the power grid went down for over a year?
You would get cooked from all the radioactivity coming from melt-downs and boil-offs happening at our 104 commercial nuclear power plants.
The spent fuel pools at each plant contain up to 7 times more long-lived radionuclides than exist in the reactor core. An average pool holds several times more radioactive cesium than was released by all atmospheric nuclear weapons tests combined.
Lose the cooling system for a spent fuel pool and the water will begin to boil in hours to days. If the water boils down enough to expose the spent fuel, much if it will heat to the point of rupture and even ignition.
Back-up diesel generators have 6 days worth of fuel.
double post
Not really following your logic. Nuclear power plants make energy to send to the grid. They would still be able to make the energy (presumably they self feed their energy production) just not be able send it out to the grid and to all us useless eaters.
They don't feed themselves. The cooling systems are dependent on external supply. There are no bypass switches.
They were never designed to work properly, once you get into the details. Every corner cut, on every NPP. Fukushima has exposed all that x1,000.
I think it would be something like this for the entire year
http://www.liveleak.com/view?i=620_1341213161
Wow. That was fucking epic.
Any system that hot is able to power its own cooling by bleeding off the heat to run pumps. I know they're not but they could be. It's sad what passes for politically-approved engineering these days.
Is fap to downloaded porn on a laptop powered by a solar panel bought at Harbor Freight the correct answer? Not that I've done or thought of such future issues...
Seriously, the sooner the better is my hope for such events (not the internet pron being gone but society turning to Anarchy).
It would be a resurgence of Oui Magazine.
Ah, the old days...
JUGGS
How wonderful for posting this on the internet. fucking morons!
And if you don't think some government goon squad wiped them fingerprints, on this false flag lets scare people into more funding. your Nuts
Wow, the power companies sure are working the scare tactics to get capacity prices up.
I clear my browser cache fairly often and then relog back in and sometimes scroll down. Maybe it's been brought up before but has anyone noticed this one?
"Zero Hedge[1] is a batshit insane Austrian economics-based finance blog run by a pseudonymous founder who posts articles under the name "Tyler Durden," after Chuck Palahniuk's Fight Club personality."
http://rationalwiki.org/wiki/Zero_Hedge
It's kind of funny if you read it but I'm not sure if we should take it as a compliment or an insult. Whoever came up with this "insane" idea/meme is full retard if you ask me. There is a difference between being fucking stupid and knowing what is going on. Only barely is any credit given to the Hedge. AND he's begging for money to boot. They are just so worried that we exist? Does it really bother them so much that some asshole has to write that about ZeroHedge?
What are we supposed to do? Get stupid all of a sudden?
Yeah, truth is batshit in an empire of bullshit.
+1 Seize Mars. We all fuck with one another but are generally on the same page,
ZH gets 50k clicks a day and that site gets 12 all year? Fuck him and the financier that funds that crap.
"CNBS is brought to you today by RATionalwiki.shit"
Yep IR, I think whoever this is, is picking a fight with the wrong group of folks. We won't be sniffing Arianna's rotten crotch. We don't come here looking for a date. If someone doesn't like ZeroHedge they can fuck off and simply not look at it.
That's the problem with the people calling for pure rationality, they only accept accredited media and scientists. Meaning official state info which only leads you back to one place in your logic... Sure, everyone is crazy but the 'science' that says everything is just fine, there's an app for that, etc. ad nauseum.
It's not like we weren't warned...
rationalwiki......so what are they saying, everyone else is irrational?
Yeah, I think the answer here is that we need more epic mis-allocation of capital.
Sure we need to rebuild infrastructure, but I would prefer a synthetic granite countertop, purchased on credit.
Woo-hoo! Isn't Rothschilds & Sons grand!?
Puts the comany store to shame, it does!
Oh...wait. It IS the company store.
Damn..
Just don't mess with upcoming episodes of "Downton Abbey." That's all I ask......
NEWFOUNDLAND
I have $100 on them putting some of those scum TSA thugs on this. They´ll have 'em running check points for a 1000 mile radius or so around each one (The entire country.).
TSA thug Shaniqua: "I'll have to check you asshole, sir."
American citizen: "But I'm just going over there to 7-11 for some milk."
TSA thug Shaniqua:"I'm sorry, sir. I'm still going to have to check your asshole."
"Should a guillotine use be wasted on a Shaniqua?!"
You only find true terrorists by digging in their assholes.
It's cool, I've booked marked a lot of survival videos on youtube. I'll just check it when the power goes down.
Wait, what? I need power for youtube?...
Long live the Paper Book. just don't burn the wrong ones for heat
Master Blaster runs Barter Town.
-There would be no heat for your home.
CORDS OF WOOD
-Water would no longer be pumped into most homes.
WELL WATER
-Your computer would not work.
GOOD CUZ BOOKS ARE FUN
-There would be no Internet.
DOUBLE GOOD
-Your phones would not work.
EVEN BETTER
-There would be no television.
I DONT WATCH TV
-There would be no radio.
I OWN SHORT WAVE WITH GENNY
-ATM machines would be shut down.
DONT NEED THEM
-There would be no banking.
SEE ABOVE
-Your debit cards and credit cards would not work.
SEE TWO ABOVE
-Without electricity, gas stations would not be functioning.
THIRTEEN HORSES
-Most people would be unable to do their jobs without electricity and employment would collapse.
GARDEN AND FARM THEN
-Commerce would be brought to a standstill.
BARTER
-Hospitals would not be able to function.
WIFES A DOC WITH SUPPLIES
-You would quickly start running out of medicine.
NOPE
-All refrigeration would shut down and frozen foods in our homes and supermarkets would start to go bad.
EAT WELL FIRST THREE DAYS THEN GO TO FOOD STOCK
I think we'd be better than most, but it's be hard as hell regardless.
I think someone forgot that for millenia humans lived fine with no refrigerators, no cars, no paper money, no electronic money, no bank machines. We found medicine in the wild & learned how to tame that wild & make concentrates for medicines.
Few people know that now but that's knowledge to be bartered for other skills.
A great book for the collection is Bushcraft by Mors Kochanski (moreso for the north). One of the best books you can find.
.
No worries mates.
Behold, the newest honorary tribe member and next designated saviour of the US! She and co-prez Bill be fixin it fo us.
http://news.yahoo.com/american-jewish-congress-lauds-hillary-clinton-024...
Is this a not-so-veiled warning that a decision has been made to make this happen, or is it that once again utilities want Americans to "cut back" after which utilities decide their bottom line is smaller so they raise prices? Sorry for the cynicism, I didn't start out this way, but after 6 decades of cynical self-serving b.s. from government and corporations, it's hard not to be.
Ya, the writing is on the wall for those who can see.
ILLILLILLI
Wolves and cougars are making combacks too!
bullshit the USA could just turn on HALF the power plants weve decomishioned to be greener and fuck it would be warmer than Christmas
SNR's, Small Nuclear Reactors and passively cooled, can't melt down. One for every larger town, and more as the city becomes larger. Go Thorium and its green and safe as you can get. By-passes long strung out power lines, less loss in transmission, greater usable power, close the larger nuclear plants on waterways and along fault lines, provide jobs, create real wealth; at the same time start placing breakers systems on these giant transformer sites while cutting down on their load, which again brings us back to the reason for SNR's.
In the 10-20 years to bring one to market, so many people will be dead from Fukushima that no one will finance the loans to distribute them. Anything nuclear will be blacklisted.
We're only 3 years in, and a full biocollapse is taking place across Japan, the North Pacific and North America. I can't imagine how bad it will be in 10-20 years.
There will be no funding for anything nuclear.
Ok, I can deal with most of it.
Shoot foiod- chek
wood stove- check
solar shower- chek
shitty garden- check- at l;east it brings the critters in....
crik in back yard- chek
I need a oil well.....
best i got is make gas from wood... check- look up making charcoal and gasses involved.....
How to make chain saw run after I run out of gasoline.....priceless...........
There will be issues....
No one would be able to 'cope' if the nation lost power in a catastrophic manner. And yet it almost happened in 2012 with a large solar flare. It could easily happen with an EMP blast, or a near miss from a major asteroid/meteor. Modern society would fail in this case, and none of the major nations would survive. Nuclear plants have been mentioned as a major life threat. The just-in-time convoy of trucks to every store in the country would screech to a halt. There would be major unrest in urban areas after the stores ran out of food (3days).
None of that is likely, but it is not without precedent. Electricity is a major reason the earth supports as many people as it does, and if it went away for long, there would be a lot of dying very fast.
Someone just bought the candle monopoly
for protection?
That's what I call going backward.
But it looks like it's not democracy here
not democracy somewhere else and instead
puppets selling shadows.
Instead of war, de-constructing the Arctic
and destroying the Gulf, it should be simple
democracy and markets process informed:
high tech jobs in West Virginia making coal
cleaner and letting lucky families with oil
in their back yards in Texas help bridge the
gap to 100% renewables.
We obviously need to create democracy
all around and/or decentralize the grid
and learn cooperation instead of fear
and control.
This report is such BS.... Always alternatives to stepping down power from 500KV to 69KV.... Stop trying to promote fear ZH
what kind of suck ass engineering puts you in a situation where this can happen?
Jeez, and here I'd been sitting worried about out living my retirement funds....one less thing to worry about now.
Cities would be fucked because the type of people that populate them. Once you are out of there, you would be surprised how many guys can get things figured out. I've seen guys in the oil patch do all kinds of innovative, make it up as they go along, and solve problems. I knew a guy who slid off an icy road way into the ditch out in the country at night. He didn't have a winch and it was too cold to walk the miles back to a home. He took his tow strap, chained one end to a tree, put the other end loop between his dual rear wheels, put a pipe through the the slots in the wheels and strap loop, and drove up and out of the ditch with his improvised winch.
most people don't have skills to take care of themselves if the power goes out for more than 6 hrs. we prepare for natural disasters always and we have lived most of this winter off grid using solar well pumps, solar and wind power, and wood stove for heating and cooking. if you live the life style without it you will never miss it when its gone.
Theres a company in Oklahoma that makes solar well pumps for ranchers. Comes with pump, wire, and panel. You attach 1/2 drip line to to pump and then run it down the casing just off the bottom. Punch a hole in the line near the top as a weep Because wells are shallow out there and run dry with constant pumping that solars do, the pump is designed to run dry. I got one in my shop boxed up. If somwething like this happens, I will set it up and reverse feed it into my house through a house hydrant. Also, got a lot of folks posting about if this happens can't run a generator non stop. In this type of scenario, frugality gets you by. Smart folks would start their generator just long enough to pump water to a tank on their roof and then let it gravity feed down into their house as needed. After that, I dont think the generator would be running so as to conserve fuel.
"If a group of agents working for OUR government/terrorist organization wanted to bring us to our knees, they could do it."
Just sayin'.
the Fed's seek a unified national grid ...
control the power, control the people.
the FERC failed at an initial attempt to
nationalize with "Standard Market Design".
after this failure the Energy Policy Act of 2005
laid the framework to transform a cooperative
council (NERC) into a corporation designed to
force compliance with uniform, FERC designated
reliability requirements and spur fear based
misallocation of resources. non-compliance
is heavily fined and the FERC capriciously
wields its "eminent domain authority".
national grid ...
control the power, control the people.
this will never happen they need the grid up to keep facebook online
Lights out would mean zero zero hedge??
I'm man enough to admit..I LIKE modern conveniences and grocery stores and TV....unlike you Grizzly Adams wannabes..
The major threat is mass immigration and load demand combined with infrastructure non-investment, not lack of security personnel, the threat is the load, not terrorism.
Americas water & power infrastructure is being looted to fund Mexican invasion, LADWP diverts over 120 million a year to the city of LA on top of their 10% utility tax, those diverted funds come out of their deferred maintenance budget, instead of replacing old overtaxed under sized transformers they pay Mexicans to breed.
BTW you can short out a transformer or substation with a simple _____ ______.
You kidding? Mexico and Canada will be dealing with millions of Yankees trying to escape!
Doomers, Preppers, and WhatIffers, all need to get a reality check.
It SEEMS probable, possible - but then a look at history reveals that it does not happen that way.
Depending on the culture - Japan, Germany, Iowa on the top side, China, Mogadishu on the bottom - it takes years or decades. The Roman Empire didn't just evaporate, it was like Detroit where your fancy high paying job became your grandson tending a garden plot where your neighbours house was 75 years prior.
3 days worth of prep, common sense. More than that and your prep should be to become mobile. Katrina, staying put was stupid. Things fall apart, leave. Anything really bad will either have your neighbours or whatever .Gov exists taking it "for the good of the community" or it won't matter. Argentina great example, lots of time to prep, free and clear rental property best asset, have to work with the neighbours, learn to deal with the downshifted lifestyle.
Mad Max? Nope not even close. If 2 years prep made no difference in Argentina then it won't be useful anywhere, anytime, anyplace.
Anything that disrupts all global food supplies for greater than 2 years is The End and you won't survive. No one will.
You cannot Prep for Tunguska, a Supervolcano or a 1km+ asteroid impact. No one survives The Road. Eventually everyone freezes as the planet is dead.
A Toba-sized eruption will cause a 6 year winter, a 200 year cooling period, 1000 years of lower temps and maybe even a new ice age. Prep for that? Not possible unless your bug out cabin is on Mars.
If you garden or farm then you know how long it takes to make land productive. If you need to use 2 years of stored food, then 7.6 billion others need that food, too - and you don't have enough ammo.
I suggest researching lockdown scenarios. There is some government information available on how they plan to sector off the grid of cities to quarantine, and it's quite a bit like the film REC.
It may not happen, but there is increasing fragility and in a few years a bit of data could take everything down quickly. You may think you have a week but really decisions could come down to a couple of hours. It's not that easy walking out of a city.
Another "What if".
Has this ever happened anywhere? No.
Have similar situations happened? Yes.
Did your scenario occur in those situations? No.
Did everyone die? No.
Katrina had days of warning. Anyone with neurons left.
Therefore you are planning for a non-eventuality.
Collapsing society next to you.
Gee you mean the government didn't consider this when they decided to go around the planet and make us the most hated nation on earth? Go figure.
Shouldn't someone at the FERC BE FIRED FOR PUBLICIZING THIS INFORMATION? WTF???? HEY AL QUEDA / JIHADI / TERRORISTS ... JUST IN CASE YOU dont know how to really hurt us .... here is some TOP SECRET information we want you to consider...CANT ANYONE KEEP THEIR FUCKING MOOUTH SHUT AND KEEP A SECRET...who "manages" this agency.... are they that stupid or are they deliberately promoting and assisting terrorism... oh and byt he way - who did the attemt on the power stations... wouldn't that be good to know.... this administration is run by libtard idiots who shoud return to the academic ivory tower from whence they came..
Esum, please, stop shouting, take a few deep breaths, and try to listen for a minute.
First of all, you must have seen the evidence that Al Qaeda is a US intelligence operation, with connections to the Saudi government, right?
If you're paying attention, you must know that Osama BinLaden was from one of the wealthiest families in Saudi Arabia, construction moguls and close friends and allies of the Bush family. Right?
So they should have no shortage of access to high level intelligence and technical information and the ability to interpret it, right?
So why wouldn't they have thought about taking down the power grid already? Is there really anything in this post they wouldn't have been able to find out or figure out?
Listen to Ed Snowden's recent interview on YouTube. Listen to it 3 or 4 times, until the anger wears off and you can really hear him.
< None of this is about keeping secrets out of the hands of terrorists - or foreign governments. >
Our government is not afraid of terrorists. They are afraid of us. The people.
They should be.
isn't it stuff like the article comments on -- security weaknesses -- that the Dept of Homeland Security should be focusing on rather than feeling up 90 year old grannies in wheelchairs... PRIORITIES.. PRIORITIES.. and is there any sign of INTELLIGNET LIFE within the USSA government???? or are they all busy STEALING TAXPAYER MONEY AND ENRICHING THEMSELVES.... it starts at the top and flows downhill... what a bunch of sorry sacks of shit running the clown show...
But what if they like feeling up 90 year old grannies? Are they supposed to just stop? Then how much money are we supposed to spend on Post-Traumatic Feeeling up Granny Syndrome... Sure.. Spend spend spend... Thats always the answer.....
OK, here's why this is urgent right now. Not terrorism. War.
We know the US is preparing for war with Russia and China, and we know it's getting serious.
We can be certain the US has advanced plans for strategic strikes to wipe out their strategic nuclear forces on the ground - probably preemptively.
If either country succeeds in mounting a strategic response - even, or especially, if they only can get a few thermonuclear-bomb delivery systems through to target - high altitude EMP blasts are a no-brainer.
............
A consequence of a grid shutdown, perhaps the most horrific, that would follow within days or weeks: virtually every nuclear plant in the US becomes a giant "dirty bomb". Dozens of Fukushimas.
Got your radiation detector yet? Don't forget the spare batteries.
See discussion thread started by Tall Tom at 04:07 for more. Then go to GlobalResearch.ca and search on Fukushima. There are lots of claims and counter-claims about how damaging the radioactive contamination they produced was and is, but there is no doubt that Fukushima and Chernobyl produced a lot of it, spread over large areas, with serious and long lasting consequences. Or that many Fukushimas would be very, very bad.
How bad? We may just have to find out.
Back in my day the definitive book on the end of the world as we know it was Alas Babylon. Today the definitive book is One Second After. I think if you read that book it will put you on the terrorist watch list. I picked up my copy at Gatwick airport on my way home and gave it to a refrigerator repairman. A good book should be passed on.
I live in central Florida and as I recall, the book gave a paragraph to Florida, we lost all but one percent of our population. Should the lights go out it would be the epitome of the zombie apocalypse. Can you imagine what Miami would look like after the power had gone off for a week and the denizens came to realize that it was not coming back on?
The sixty thousand survivors of that hell will be lethal beyond imagination. What comes next is the end of civilization.
We had some small experience with grid failure during the 04 hurricane season when three storms came right over the top of our house. In some areas the power was out for weeks. What kept everything from coming unglued was the fact that you could see hundreds of utility crews from all over the country working together to get it back on line. What did happen was that the grocery stores could not run their registers and hundreds of thousands of dollars’ worth of meat and produce spoiled. There was no gasoline and no police because the sheriff’s office had no gasoline. There was no water because the back up generators for the pumps ran out of diesel. The sewer system failed because the pumps no longer worked.
We were personally very fortunate for two reasons: We had a self-contained travel trailer with a propane stove and refrigerator. And we had two generators. I was the only person on my street with ability to produce electricity. I put a generator on a trailer and pulled it to my mother’s house and ran it for four hours and them took it to my in laws and ran it for four hours. I was able to keep their freezers from spoiling.
Fortunately my father in law had played baseball with the guy who owned the local bulk plant. Crisp one hundred dollar bills bought us a fifty five gallon drum full of gasoline. I filled that drum up three times that season.
I discovered that a couple of cold beers can diffuse an argument real quick when people haven’t bathed in four or five days. Tempers get short when people are hot and tired. The good news was that a lot of people were contained because they had no gasoline. Our’s was a rural county and within a few days the national guard began to distribute MREs, tarps, and water. That pretty much kept things together. Still it was evident that things began to fray along the edges. Had the power crews not been visible and had rumors spread that the power was never going to come back on, the situation would have gotten out of hand in short order.
Don't just hoard and fortify, Organize.
Block committees and neighborhood committees for mutual survival. For defense, for fire fighting and radiation safety, for food and water distribution and whatever health care you can organize, for information sharing, for organizing transport and trade.
Urban or rural, this kind of self-organization is our best hope for avoiding the horrific meltdown Cloud 9.5 points to. And it is the foundation of the new government that must emerge.
Best preparation: find good excuses to get out and knock on neighbors' doors and start building relationships with them. All of them. Cause we'll all be in it together.
Beyond the no water part, losing the rest of the list would seem like a net positive.....:)
Oh great. Thanks for publishing this. Now all the terrorists know.
Rules of the Game
(G Gordon Liddy)
OMNI - Jan 1989
http://smasher.org/tmp/RULES_OF_THE_GAME.PDF
there are a few simple things you can do to keep elements of civilization going in the face of a power outage of short/intermediate duration. Get a gas water heater with a pilot light, you don't need power to have a hot shower. Get a gas fireplace insert, one or two will keep a normal size house pretty comfy and prevent frozen pipes.
a back up generator with a couple jerry cans of gas and/or rooftop solar elecrtic will provide some power, a gas powered back up home generator is a bigger ticket item for more power longer
these are all things that you'll use for mundane blackouts and keep you comfy for the first week of armageddon
Read 'One Second After', by William Forstchen, for a fictionalized version of what would actually happen in such an event. Heavily researched and authenticated, it will leave you wondering WTF...
www.onesecondafter.com