Are EMP's a big deal?

Well are they? What is the likelihood that a nuclear or non-nuclear EMP is going to destroy society? And if one does, will you really care if your laptop/cellphone/mp3 player still work? I just don't see EMPs as being a major concern when it comes to preparing for emergencies. I'd rather spend my time and resources on contingencies that I'm more likely to encounter.

It isn't a big deal. You'll loose some gear, but if you thought ahead, you won't loose much data because you've burned it to optical media, and you can use a compass and map. Sure, long range comm is pretty much out, but if you've planned ahead, anyone who would be worried will know you have a plan and your plan has a safety margin in terms of time as to when they can expect you to show up if comms are out.

It is worth planning for becuase while it is a relatively low probability scenario that for someone prepared pretty easily compensated for, it is a serious one. Just like a plague or the old Y2K-bug. What all three of those have in common, other than being less likely to occure than a bad storm or earthquake, once you've prepared for the likely, getting ready for the unlikely doesn't really cost anything more than sitting down with a few sheets of paper and a pencil and thinking about if for a little while.

Now, if you want implausable scenarios, the zombies or an alien invasion. I like alien invasions who do not come in peace and don't care who your leader is. That's just fun think about.

I would agree that I don't give EMP any thought in terms of my personal preparedness. There's really not that much we can do in addition to the usual preparations that I would consider very practical. Wrap my electronics stuff in aluminum foil? Well, I'm not convinced that would help. Build a Faraday cage inside my house? Well, maybe during the height of the Cold War, but doesn't seem to make as much sense now.

However, and this is a huge "if"...if we ever had a situation like a high-altitude nuclear burst over the continental US, that is going to drastically affect most/all of us for quite a while. Just think about EMP's effect on the electrical grid of this country. Imagine no electricity for weeks during the summer heat. It didn't really seem to get that much coverage in the US, but 52,000 people died in the European heat wave of 2003. That makes Katrina's death toll look puny in comparison.

It's interesting that there seems to be more posts about EMP lately on this forum compared to a year ago. I don't watch the TV show Jericho so I'm not sure EMP was a big issue on that show, but I wonder if that's sparking this increased interest lately?

I remember that summer in 2003, the death tolls in central Europe were shocking, because it mainly affected the elderly and because it caused so many problems for the Health services of France and other European countries. In France it got to the point where there wasn't even enough room in the mortuaries in some of the France’s main cities. Even here is Scotland in 2003 the constant hot weather was unrelenting but just manageable without air conditioning. (You should realise just how scary that last sentence was). Global warming was put forward as the main causative factor for the death toll in Europe just as it was for the Katrina Hurricane disaster. There has just been a report here that the warmest temperatures in the UK for April have been the warmest ever recorded being over 3 degrees warmer than normal. I fear that Europe could see the same problems as in 2003 and it might be the US faces the same problems as in 2005 this year. Talking about EMP effects on the forum might be topical because of the agenda set by some in the US media boogie man terror circles but the real threat to every ones way of life lies elsewhere. The debate in the US is just some years behind everyone else in the world. That debate is about Global Warming and how to tackle it. I Don't think I've seen a thread about this issue on the forum!

I think EMP has become such an issue (at least for me) is that terrorist groups are continually trying to make or obtain a nuke. If a terrorist group is able to obtain a single nuclear weapon then the way for them to get the most bang for their buck is employing it in such a manner to use the EMP to the utmost. I don’t think it will be knocking out the entire US because of the logistics involved in making a rocket large enough to put it high enough to cause that much damage. But with a small pressurized plane they could get high enough to cause a black out along the east coast that would knock out most of the electrical grid, causing blackouts across most of the country. Most of the country would be up and running again in a week or two but the damage to the east coast would take years to recover from. As far as nature we are constantly being bombarded by the radiation from solar flares and it constantly causing problems with satellites and communications. With every solar flare (that comes our way) we run a 50/50 chance of EMP doing a great deal of damage depending on it’s magnetic polarity.

NASA just issued a warning that in March of 2008, the next solar cycle starts and that people should prepare for possible electrical and electronic blackouts as a result.

I don't think this is what a terrorist would do with a nuclear weapon if they were able to get hold of one. Sticking the bomb down into the Cumbre Vieja would be what they would do. Anybody seen the film the 'The Dambusters'. Similar sort of idea.

Runs upward until it peaks probably the winter of '11-'12. It's gonna be interesting.

They'd probably just stick it in a truck and hit a major banking center- NY, LA, London, Paris, Berlin, maybe Tokyo.

And the area of effect at such a low altitude would be pretty small. It's easier just to stick it in a light plane and simulate an airburst from a stealthed warhead, then sit back and watch the fun.

As far as I’m concerned, EMP is pretty simple to deal with. Simply line whatever containers you use to store your emergency gear with some copper mesh fabric and make sure your gear is insulated from the mesh. Normal copper mesh has been shown to have a very high attenuation rate (~108 dB) in the frequencies that EMPs put most of their energy (3 Hz — 30 kHz) and an acceptable attenuation even at the higher frequencies. (Keep in mind that attenuation is measured in dB, which is a logarithmic scale, i.e. 10 dB attenuation cuts the signal to 1/10th power, 20 dB to 1/100th, 30 dB to 1/1,000th, …, 100 dB to 1/10,000,000,000th. 108 dB attenuation is around 1/68-billionth, or 0.00000000000016%, of its original power.)

The way I figure it, using a Faraday cage container isn’t too difficult to put together, and should keep your equipment pretty safe from EMP, solar CME, and whatever other EMF transients may happen. And the bottom line… if the stuff in the container still fries, it was pretty much toast anyway. But, that only applies to the stuff you can keep in a container. All the other stuff, the best you can do is hope.

The only reason that the EMP became a recent topic is because some of us read "Lights Out" by Halfast. I think that because it's a high potential impact and it struck me as interesting it seemed to be a topic worth a thread or two. I even started one because I was curious about the effects. Some on the forum have provided useful, positive information and I thank them for it.

Others have provided funny commentary along with their input and I truly enjoy that. BTW - Iron Raven, I picked up "Zombie Survival Manual" from the public library Saturday and I spent most of Sunday laughing and rolling on the floor. Definitely recommend it.

If someone doesn't like the EMP topic, or any other threads, I suggest that they just ignore them and move to a different thread that holds your own interest. There's no need to jump on a thread to criticize those just seeking information and skills. Isn't that our greatest asset during an emergency?

Yep, it's not the little things that concern me about an EMP, it is the wholesale loss of electicity in just about any form once the batteries are gone. Alternators and generators will be rendered inoperative, so will anything with a piezo device in it. Relatively speaking, though, I am not too concerned these days about the chance of an EMP being lit off.

As for terrorists, it would be of far greater impact for them to detonate a dirty nuke in a metro area than to try and generate an EMP. Most tactical nukes, such as what they would likely get their hands on, won't be able to generate an EMP big enough to effect an entire region, let alone the whole country. Now if they could set off a bomb in the right location to allow the cloud to drift over a large enough area, that would fubar us pretty bad I think.

I fully expect that the next solar cycle peak will impact us quite severely. The sun is already overheating the solar system now, and the amount of radiation it is kicking out should reach some of the highest levels ever recorded. It would not surprise me at all if we take a direct hit from a major flare in the next decade and lose a lot of the birds we've put up, such as our GPS, our weather sats, our broadband telecoms. We could see the first 150+ Mhz persistent skip zone in recorded history.

And you thought your cellphone coverage was bad now!

A nuke at extreme altitude of a small personal plane would do almost as much damage to any of the cities noted above but would have the additional effect of the EMP for a localized area, that would cause a ripple effect along (at least the US power grid) causing a huge death toll across the affected area.

Yes, you get EMP, but at that level, everything you surged is either squashed flat by the pressure wave or melted/ignited by the thermal pulse. If I'm on fire then put out by a wall of air moving at mach, I'm not so worried about my car not starting as I am about being a lightly smoking, radioactive pile smear of grease.

Part of the reason why I'm sometimes a little bit joking about EMP is because let's face it, it mean you've lost power at the same time your car has died. For the first day or two, basic preps will be fine so long as no riots break out and any disruption of services in a urbanized area brings that risk, so those of us who would dig in rather than bug out in the face of hurricane or after an earthquake already know this drill.

After that, the reality will sink in and honestly unless you are in a position to influence the behaviors of large numbers of people, then you're just going to have to roll with it. If it is very wide spread, you aren't getting external support and resupply, so you are suddenly going to have to worry about something worse than having to replace my computer- the 90% of people who are hungry and unprepared.

Also, while everyone talks about EMP, they ignore than in most scenarios, EMP is part of decapitation before a strike with either conventional or nuclear explosives. The former is called "war", the latter has problems a lot bigger than my electronic banking records are gone, both of those being things that the average citizen is not really able to do much about that other than to hope that our elected representatives and their career advisors (a) aren't fallout and (b) don't choke.

If you loose your harddrive, anything you didn't back up is gone- if it is important, put it on hardcopy, if it's kinda important but not critical, put it on CDs and DVDs. That's just computercraft. Have a backup plan for mobility, getting water, keeping food, staying warm, and making light. And be ready for normally average-to-smart people in a large group to do something amazingly stupid. How does EMP honestly differ from any other major problem such as a hurricane, earthquake, epidemic or an expeditionary and colonial fleet from a non-Terrestrial nation, other than outside support might not be there ever if the effects are widespread, rather than in a few days to a week? How do you plan for that, other than to gather the tools you think you'll need and be ready to adapt?

You know,there comes a point in the ETS game where the law of diminishing returns kicks in and says "folks things have gotten just bad enough now that surviving it may not be that desirable". Up to a point, I will tolerate a fair amount of abuse, stress and having to do without all the niceties. When the line gets crossed, well, you gotta think what is life gonna be like coming out the other side of the big nasty.

So for surviving the mild to moderate catastrophes, I reckon it is worth the time, effort and money I have put out and will continue to do so, especially if it means getting through it all stands a good chance of elevating my relative position. But if the heat gets turned up too high, even the chicken can't dance that fast, know what I mean Vern?

So while the idea of surviving an EMP strike is plausible, is it really gonna be worth it, considering all the other implications such an event would likely entail?

One thing I don't understand: You build a Faraday cage for your equipment, you get a solar flare that fries everything electronic/electrical for at least 500-1000 miles around you (possibly best-case scenario for EMPs).

So, what good is having your electronics saved, when all the access lines (etc) are dead around you? Am I understanding the scenario correctly? I do understand about having all your info on CDs, for when power eventually comes back (a year or more later), which makes sense. But having the only working computer in a an otherwise 250,000 sq mile dead zone would be some kind of advantage?

Sue

Yep! You'll have bought yours when they were cheap.

April 27, 2007 3:14 PM PDT
Solar storm warning: You have a year to prepare
Posted by Harry Fuller
The federal government now predicts a new cycle of solar storms will start in March 2008. Those storms are expected to peak around the end of 2011. That's the conclusion of some scientists at NOAA.
Solar storms lead to violent eruptions on the sun's surface. There'll be solar flares and explosions sending highly charged matter toward Earth's atmosphere. This jolts Earth's geomagnetic field and ionosphere. That can lead to disruption of electric grids and communications systems.
Sunspot predictions for this coming storm cycle run from 90 to 140. There were different prediction models among the scientists and that led to disagreement over how strong the next solar storm cycle might be. Stick around, we'll find out.

from nasa nws release

You park your Honda generator inside the cage, and can still fire it up after the SHTF. Of course, you'd better have a real good supply of gas or diesel on hand...

"You park your Honda generator inside the cage, and can still fire it up after the SHTF. Of course, you'd better have a real good supply of gas or diesel on hand... "

Why? What is anyone else going to be using the gas for?

Sue

Well, if you have an older vehicle, one with points instead of electronic ignition, and carbed instead of fuel injected, and you keep a spare alternator in the faraday cage, you might be able to use the car after the fact. That is stretching it a bit, though.

Of course, getting the gas when all the pumps are shot and the power grid is offline is problematic anyways. In any case, nothing that would still be usable would still be used the same. If I had a functioning motor vehicle and only had one tank of gas to use in it, you bet I would save it as long as possible.

I think the point is the technology we've come to rely so heavily on over the past hundred years is still pretty fragile stuff, and any number of events can throw us back to the good ole days. Unlikely as they may be, I think it is prudent to maintain at least a basic fall back plan for such events. Oil lamps, candles, wood/hog fuel stoves, manual pumps, these are all relatively inexpensive and useful items to have around. Hey, if it works up at elk camp, then why not at home? To me, it is cheap insurance.

You know, them rural folks that seem to just get by year after year without really joining the rat race, yet being able to make do with a lot of their own efforts are probably more likely to remain relatively unphased by the average catastrophic event. I know a few families who put up 300 or more quarts of locally produced food stocks using a pressure canner or two and a wood stove out back. At any given time, they have at least 6 months of food put up for the entire family, a working well, a fuel source, and a fair distance from any real strategic location. They also have a vast array of manual and powered tools, and since they usually take care of fixing things themselves most of the time, field expedience is often a daily activity.

I been thinking real hard about taking my bankroll and heading out to the boonies myself. The only drawback is that as I get older, I suspect my reliance of modern medical services will grow, and being 100 miles from the nearest hospital might be a critical factor.

I guess that is the way it goes.

Not me.

I would rather stay fully integrated in the grid (Electric, Financial, Social, etc.) where I can afford to buy & store away the tools (guns/ammo, canning equipment, etc.) that would allow me to transition to the late 1800's only if/when that becomes necessary.

I do undertand that the rat race can consume you and that is why some yearn for the old days. But for me the answer is properly managing the rat race instead of running from it.

And the medical that you mention is a good enough reason to stay in the high tech world...

Even though an EMP blast might knock us out for a while - if you can survive it we will definitely come out the other side. The knowledge of how technology works will not be lost & we humans are a very creative bunch when our backs are against the wall.

Boy, this has been an *interesting* read. Want some really good (and definitative) information on EMP, its effects and how to protect electronic equipment? Check out this series of articles from the ARRL (American Radio Relay League) published in "QST" August - November 1986.

url= http://www.arrl.org/tis/info/pdf/88615.pdf

As for cars, the UK TV show "Top Gear" had a VW Golf (rented at the local airport) zapped 600K volts (with a driver in it!) to examine what would happen if your car was struck by lightning. The result - it cranked right up and everything worked. (The EMP effects of lightning are discussed in the above article.)

In short, fairly everyday practices and relatively inexpensive over-the-counter hardware can protect your electronics gear from all but the most intense EMP events.


Jim Jr

In the UK a WV is more than likely to be a diesel and may have less strict pollution controls so the engine may start and run with no computer controls so without knowing all the deatils of that test its not a good example. Gas engine vehicles in the US have a lot more complexity than other parts of the world. For example my truck has an engine computer under the hood which communicates with the body computer and computer in the instrument cluster via a network like data bus. Then there is a small computer in the ABS and SBA systems as well as one in each door and another for the air bag which all communicate on the data bus. And mine isn't enev a high end model which have more bus connected compueters under the seats and in the entertainment systems and tracton control, etc. OTPH modern electronics are in some ways more robust. In the 60's when the military conducted EMP experiments electronics were simple. A single transistor was simply a transistor, now that package looking like a transistor has a transistor with over voltage, over current, over temperature, etc protection and the circuits they are built from have several protection devices also. Then the vehicle systems are made a little better protected as well. My truck has a small fuse for nearly every electrical item and then those are fed from branch circuits with larger slower acting fuses and then finally a main fusible link. So there are three levels of fuse protection for any device and I of course being prepared have enough spares to replace them all if needed.

Don't understand that assumption! What other parts of the world are you referring to. Japan (Nissan, Toyota, Honda) or Europe (BMW, Mercedes, Audi, VW, Volvo, Citroen, Saab, Peugeot, Fiat). The vehicles in the US may be bigger so that their larger occupants can fit in them but they are not anymore sophisticated than else where in the world. The engine development work even for US vehicle manufacturers such as Ford and GM relies on European and Japanese engineering expertise in their subsidiary companies in these global regions. Anybody reading this would think that the computer was invented in the US and that US vehicles are the only ones to have engine management systems.

Unless things have changed since the last time I tried to ship a car to the US from Germany, in which I had to make several changes to glass, electrical system, and other safty related items before I could meed guidelines for US cars. it turned out to be more than the car was worth. there is a big difference in cars in the US from those in Europe, and as far as the larger people here in the US unless thats changed in the last few years..... I'll be nice.

Re raydarkhorse

A strange thing has happened here in the UK in the last 5-10 years, there are more and more cars on the road, the people here are getting fatter and fatter and now in the last few years the cars are getting bigger and bigger to accommodate the ever increasing size of the people causing even less room for all the every increasing numbers of cars on the road. Where will it end? Oh for the days when the roads were clear of cars when I cycled around Perthshire in the Autumn sun taking in the aroma of the Strawberry fields. Now it is usually some fat guys exhaust pipe of their newly acquired 'Chelsea Tractor'.

Yes, companies like Nissan, Honda, Toyota that are sold in the US have to have a lot of computer/electronic equipment to meet the emissions and safety standards. Im some countries you can still buy carburated or vehicles without air bags. The US it will soon be mandatory to have SBA and in take fuel filters as well as more strict Diesel emissions onctrols making the vehicles even more complex.

You can see the experiment here at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ve6XGKZxYxA

Does the EMP weapon based here have the ability to take out targeted Electrical Power Grids all over the world?

Okay, this is pretty fascinating. I pretty much challenged people to justify preparations for an EMP attack. I still don't think that EMPs are particularly high risk scenario. Although the possibility of solar flares/sun spots wrecking havoc is far more worrying. I think many of the preps centered on an EMP attack are useful. However, worrying about whether your electronics will survive seems a bit superfluous. Besides who really wants to live in a Faraday cage, or have to get their computer out of the grounded copper box every time you use it.

Finally, in terms of terrorist attacks, I don't think the cost benefit analysis of an EMP attack really supports it. A major space program would be necessary to send nuclear bombs into low earth orbit. If you have an atom bomb and an airplane, set the bomb off on the top floor of a sky rise and fly the airplane into the transmission lines for the Niagara falls power plant. Collapse of those transmission lines will cause the same sort of cascading powergrid failure that an EMP would, probably far more effectively then an low grade EMP. Meanwhile a large scale, high casualty attack at the same time would cause total confusion and fear.

How would EMPs affect things like pacemakers and other medical equipment?

Sue

Likely deactivate them, or worse.

You won't see me scrambling to prepare for any EMP attack beyond the basic preps I have already done for generic SHTF situations. Except for a few minor variables, one size of ETS fits all.

Likely deactivate them, or worse.

You won't see me scrambling to prepare for any EMP attack beyond the basic preps I have already done for generic SHTF situations. Except for a few minor variables, one size of ETS fits all.

AROTC,

I completely agree that the risk/cost/benefit analysis when preparing for an EMP makes it seem to be a waste of time. The potential impact is "high" but the likelihood is "extraordinarily low."

The only value to the exercise is that it helped me when preparing for long-term (over 48 hour) events where utilities such as water/gas/electric are unavailable. In Texas this could be caused by hurricane, tornado, massive thunderstorms, ice storm, etc. All of these events are much more likely (perhaps this afternoon in the DFW area).

Thanks for the feedback!

Possibly kill them, but nothing guaranteed. One of the problems with answering this is that most of the research was from NASA and there just aren't that many astronauts with pacemakers. If you're inside, or in a car, or there is enough cloud cover, or you are just a big person, you might be well enough sheilded. You might not.