Total Grid Failure

[Honu]

To believe this tinfoil crap is another.

what to you is tinfoil crap not to believe in ?

the fact of someone attacking using EMP ?
or the EMP effect wiping out a whole country in one swipe ?
or that this even exists ?


it is real I hope you know that ?
and its a real attack option that has been on the table for a long time with many countries and in todays world would be even more devastating

and if someone told me one day all within minutes of each other 4 planes total are going to crash into buildings two planes are going to fly into a building another into the pentagon and another fall short and crash in a field instead and close to 3000 people would die because of this !

would you have said that is tinfoil ?

[chuckman]

I would not call it "tin foil" or "right wing conspiracy crap", but I do find the possibility pretty low probability. Where I live my money needs to go into hurricane preparedness and the occasional winter storm....I certainly won't sink my money into preparing for a catastrophe that is, statistically, unlikely to occur. For those of you who can, go for it.

[austinN4]

Read One Second After by William Forstchen. Chilling.

Agree with others that this is a very good book and well worth reading.

http://www.amazon.com/One-Second-Aft.../dp/0765356864

[The_War_Wagon]

At the rate our Kenyan-in-Chieftain is shutting down coal-fired plants, I'd count on grip collapse before Christmas.

[Eurodriver]

Thanks for the obligatory "tin foil hat" and "ring wing nut job" post, guess someone had to do it.

Hypotheticals are how you figure things out without having to go through them. No reason why we cannot think about what if scenario's that could and have happened before in other parts.

The people in the US are very spoiled in this regard, and it shows in the lifestyle, culture and mindset. The "it can't happen here!" or "to me!" mindset is about the weakest link in someone's chain. You don't think it can happen? I am not talking about a zombie apocalypse, I am talking about a completely expected event, like a brown or black out that has and will occur. Thinking you are immune to it or simply will not be affected to it just because of who you are or your particular circumstance is pretty short sighted.

Let's back up.

Did I say I'm immune to a power grid failure? Did I say it's a completely impossible event? (like zombies or an alien invasion) Did I say that people in the U.S. are not 100% dependent upon electricity and running water and gasoline? Absolutely not. To suggest that is ridiculous.

I agree with many of you that books like Lights Out and One Second After or whatever are very entertaining and very real possibilities.

But that doesn't mean I'm going to sit around believing all this infowars bullshit about an imminent blackout that will result in all-out civil war and catastrophe. I have things to do.

Maybe I'm just irritated because I have a neighbor who is a complete nutcase. He kept asking me if it was true a few weeks ago if all military personnel were reporting to base to don riot gear for "imminent large scale riots over food supplies". Some posters on this forum (not you voodoo) aren't too far away from that.

The truth is that there are people who are very smart, getting paid a ton of money to make sure what this thread is about doesn't happen. They're not all in a dark room going "Shit man...we've got 3 months left and then it's just going to go kaput. Better bug out." And they're definitely not saying "Muhahaha, the minions of the earth will now suffer at our hands!!!".

I would not call it "tin foil" or "right wing conspiracy crap", but I do find the possibility pretty low probability. Where I live my money needs to go into hurricane preparedness and the occasional winter storm....I certainly won't sink my money into preparing for a catastrophe that is, statistically, unlikely to occur. For those of you who can, go for it.

Exactly.

[Armati]

This is true. Big transformers i.e. 50 MVA to 500 MVA are made to order and the backlog is months or tens of months. My employer has spares but probably not enough spares. We probably have more spares than a typical utility in part because we are municipal and not for profit. These things are expensive, a 50 MVA transformer costs about $2 million so utilities aren't keen on keeping a bunch of spares.

This has been talked about in terrorism circles for at least 20 years. Most contend that a few guys armed with simple hunting rifles could bring down much of the US power grid. Fortunately, we are at war with amateurs and morons.

[Safetyhit]

I used to think the term Right Wing Nut Job was a term of endearment by the left....Now I get it. Some of you guys are really out there...to discuss hypothetically what would happen if , is one thing. To believe this tinfoil crap is another...


...Did I say I'm immune to a power grid failure? Did I say it's a completely impossible event? (like zombies or an alien invasion) Did I say that people in the U.S. are not 100% dependent upon electricity and running water and gasoline? Absolutely not. To suggest that is ridiculous.

I agree with many of you that books like Lights Out and One Second After or whatever are very entertaining and very real possibilities.

Dude you're all over the place here. Think that neighbor has gotten to you more than you realize.

[Alex V]

William Forstchen has a link on his website to the report he based his book on. Obviously its very dry but it does have good information on just how vulnerable we are.

http://empcommission.org/

I forgot to record that Nat Geo program, hopefully its available on OnDemand...

[Dienekes]

Hell, I live up in the northern plains in a rural area. We don't have many power failures but we do have them. There are these things called blizzards...Fortunately none of them have been long--but in the winter a house starts cooling down fairly fast. It wouldn't take too long for it to be uninhabitable, not to mention busted water pipes. Couple that with a breakdown in the delivery of foodstuffs, etc., and it could get squeaky fast.

I probably should have put in a decent, high tech wood stove when I built this place, but that's hindsight. But in the past year I did install a 14 Kw standby generator that runs on natural gas. Total cost to install it was about as much as a decent used pickup. Comes time to sell this place I'll sell it faster and make my money back easily.

The power went out for about 10 hours about a month ago. My unscientific survey revealed that I was one of the few lit places in a sea of darkness out there. In bad times I think I might want to "advertise" less, but that's a separate issue.

Murphy's law is always in force. Resilience and redundancy are never bad ideas.

[4x4twenty6]

I didn't like how at the end everything was all rainbows and unicorn farts thanks to the govt and electric companies great work. It takes weeks to months after a hurricane to get power restored. But they managed to get it restored quickly when the whole country was out?! Come the hell on!
The Chinese have already shown their ability to hack in to our delicate infrastructure systems. Power grid corruption and economic collapse are not tin foil topics.