Unless you are in a jet liner, plummeting to earth, or caught in a massive traffic jam of stalled vehicles on the interstate, you might not even know anything has changed. Sure the power is off, but we’ve all been through that dozens of times. You call the power company. But the phone doesn’t work and that might be slightly more unnerving. You might go to your car to drive around and see what happened and then it becomes more unnerving when the car does not even turn over, nor any other car in your neighborhood.
Twelve hours later the food in your freezer starts to thaw, if it is winter and you don’t have a wood stove the frost will start to penetrate in to your house, if summer and you live in Florida your house will be an oven. And that will just be the start.
Law enforcement will be powerless without radios, cell phones, and squad cars, unable to know where there is a crisis and how to react. The real horror show within hours will be in hospitals and nursing homes. They’re required by law to have back up generators, but those generators are “hot wired” into the building so power can instantly kick in if the main system shuts down. That “hot wiring” means the Electro Magnetic Pulse will take out the generators and their circuitry as well.
If you are familiar with what happened in New Orleans after Katrina, multiply that ten thousand times over to every hospital and nursing home in America. Nearly everyone dependent on life support equipment in ICUs will be dead within hours. Nearly everyone in nursing homes dependent on oxygen generators, respirators, etc., will be dead or dying while depending on the time of year temperatures within plummet or soar.
As to medical supplies, not just in hospitals but across the nation to every local pharmacy, they are all dependent on something called Fed Ex. As we have perfected a remarkable system of instant delivery, guided by computers, local inventories have dropped to be more cost efficient and even for reasons of security with controlled substances, which to ordinary citizens means pain killers. Supplies will run out in a matter of days. Those of us dependent on medications to control asthma, heart disease, diabetes, and a host of other aliments which a hundred years ago would have killed us shortly after the onset. . .will now face death within days or weeks, unless the national power grid comes back on line quickly and order is restored.
HOW LONG WOULD IT TAKE?
Here is the bottom line of the entire issue and why the threat of a single EMP weapon is so dangerous. There is the serious potential that we might never be able to restore the system. One might ask why? It just means replacing some circuit breakers, pulling out fried chips in our cars and replacing them with new ones etc.
It is not that simple. The infrastructure America has developed since the beginnings of the Industrial Age, is now so vast, intricate and fragile, that it is like a delicate spider web, which if touched by a flame can instantly vanish.
A few examples to illustrate what might seem an extreme statement.
The incredibly complex system that creates electricity, starting from a hydro-electric dam, a glowing nuclear reactor, or coal fired plant, leaps through hundreds of circuit breakers, perhaps thousands of miles of wiring, across high tension lines to sub stations, and finally to the outlet your computer is plug into. This single line will now have hundreds of breaks in it, each one having to be replaced.
Any of us who have lived through a major disaster such as a hurricane, ice storm, or tornado, and then gone several days without power know the sequence, h ow much longer the wait seems to be, and then finally the welcome sight of a power company repair truck turning on to your block. . .and that truck might be from a power company five hundred miles away. All our disasters have ultimately been local in nature, Andrew in Florida, Katrina in Louisiana and Mississippi or one this author went through with Ivan in North Carolina. The disaster is local, even if fifty thousand square miles are affected, help streaming in from neighboring states, caravans of power trucks, each carrying not just experienced crews, but ladened down with all the replacement parts necessary to put electricity and phone service back into your house. When Ivan hit my town, dumping 30 inches of rain, wiping out the power grid and water supply, in less than twelve hours thousands of gallons of bottled water had arrived from Charlotte, power companies from Alabama, Tennessee and Virginia were arriving, the special parts needed to replace my town’s shattered water main from the reservoir were air lifted in by a national guard unit.
Consider though if the entire nation is “down.” Quite simply there are not enough replacement parts in the entire nation to even remotely begin the retro-fitting and replacement of all components. Every community will be on its own, struggling to rebuild. . .on their own.
Example two. A member of your family has type one diabetes and if you do have that in your family you know that failure to properly monitor and treat can result in death within a matter of weeks at most. Start with the testing kit. If it is one of the new electronic digital models, changes are a small hand held unit, not plugged into the grid will in fact survive. If it is an older kit that still uses testing stripes and you are running short of those stripes of paper, you already have a problem.
Where does insulin come from? In an earlier age it was literally made from the ground up pancreas of sheep and horses. Today it is manufactured via genetically altered bacteria and cells. There are several such factories across the nation which do this, producing millions of vials a day.
We are not even going to get into the complexity of where do the vials, the rubber seals and such come from. But with the shut down of power the factory goes dark and the complex environmental controls to insure the proper safety of the bacteria “batches” is now off line. Within days it will cease to function for that reason alone.
But it will most likely already be off line. What of the workers? Will t he next shift show up when cars no longer run? Unlikely. And those on the job? No matter how dedicated most must leave within a day to see to their own families and chances are not return.
Of the hundreds of thousands of vials waiting in refrigerated containers for shipping, what happens to the coolant? And where are the trucks to move it? If the insulin is, in fact, already in the “pipeline” so to speak, if aboard a Fed Ex plane we already know that tragic fate. If on a highway it will be stalled. . .and so on to your local pharmacy where the few vials in the current inventory will be snatched up by panicked customers within hours and then hoarded away, regardless of the need of others. And even then, how will you keep the insulin temperature stabilized and when that fails, how swiftly does the potency drop?
But one other factor, the syringes to inject the medicine. Any of us over 45 or so can recall the dull terrible needles in our doctor’s offices. (As a child I recall my grandmother boiling my diabetic grandfather’s needles.) After use they were stuck back into an autoclave (powered by electricity) and carefully sterilized. . .and then came the disposable syringe. Where does that needle come from. Again a long back track to an oil field, to a cracking plant, to a factory that, in sterile conditions turns the plastic into the barrel of syringe, to a mine where ore is turned into steel which is milled at remarkable tolerances into a needle point. . .and again shipped and shipped again and finally to your house.
The point of these few examples is that in an age not so long ago, nearly all that we needed for our lives was produced locally, and then came railroads, which could link a farmer’s wif e in Nebraska, via a catalog and telegraph to the Sears office in Chicago for that new set of dishes or a replacement part for a threshing machine. . .to our complex web of today. Few of us ever realized that with each advance in convenience and the latest new gadget or necessity we took another step towards dependence which in a global market today means that the chip needed to repair an important computer might be made in Japan, and ordered via a sales rep at a desk in India, and yet we expect it to arrive within two days and see nothing remarkable about that. Globalization with all its benefits and woes for some workers here, has made us infinitely more dependent on a global network of communications and transportation. . .that fragile spider’s web.
There is the true nightmare of EMP. Once the entire system collapses, how and where does anyone build it back when that one crucial part you need is in a warehouse in Shanghai or Seoul and you don’t even have means to even ask for that part.
YOU MENTION IN YOUR BOOK THAT 90% of AMERICANS MIGHT DIE WITHIN A YEAR. ISN’T THAT FEAR MONGORING?
When such numbers were discussed during the height of the Cold War, the numbers were indeed real, as they are now with the use of but one weapon to create an EMP burst.
The tragic thing is how we can discuss such numbers now in a society where the entire nation went into stunned mourning after nearly 4,000 died on 9/11.
The death of an individual is a tragedy. The death of a million a statistic.
The first few million deaths are tragically obvious. Those aboard commercial flights, and even most private flights, those in nursing homes, hospices, and hospitals.
The next few million are obvious as well. Those with severe aliments requiring careful daily medication or treatment, such as those awaiting transplants, people undergoing dialysis, those with severe heart ailments both known and not yet realized. We are use to emergency response within minutes when we snap open a cell phone and call 911. The stress, fear, even the unaccustomed physical exertion of someone having to walk ten miles to get home will trigger heart attacks, strokes, etc. We are a “hot house bred” generation, in fact several generations now. Our water supply is carefully controlled and delivered instantly and on demand, hundreds of gallons of it a day. Our food, wrapped in sanitary packages has expiration dates stamped on it. Where will you get drinkable water in a city after but several days? Frankly when was the last time any of us had to live without a flush toilet and anti-bacterial hand wash by the sink? Food that starts to thaw, which we were always cautioned to throw out, food in a refrigerator that is now at room temperature. . . do you throw it out or risk eating it? If your house is fully electric how do you cook it properly?
These few questions alone lead to a clear path straight to an entire nation heading into gastro-intestinal aliments within a week to ten days at most. Any of us who have traveled overseas, especially to third world countries have weathered them an d survived. . .thanks in part to modern medications once back safe home in the USA. But we are now the third world country. Very young children and the elderly can die in less than a day from severe dehydration and electrolyte imbalance. Without plenty of clean water and modern waste removal, the problem gets far worst, especially in temporary refugee centers.
Compound this with the fact that by the end of the week millions of Americans will be on the road. . .walking. The tragic lawlessness we often see in the wake of a large disaster will most certainly explode given that police are near powerless to react in an organized manner and national guard units will not even be mobilized since how do they mobilize if no vehicles run and all communications is still down.
Millions, many of them the most vulnerable will make the choice of abandoning the cities rather than try and fight to find a gallon jug of water or a few cans of soup. Beyond this fear, summer or winter many urban dwellings will be unlivable. The multi million dollar condo on the 40th floor is now a nightmare 400 foot hike straight up, lugging whatever water or food you might get. They will be unheated, or roasting ovens, designed of course with perfection climate control. . .that no longer works. Many will be driven, as well by the false hope that relatives out in the suburbs or better yet “out in the country” will of course have plenty of food and be willing to share.
Our interstate highways will become nightmare paths of exile as our largely urban population tries to fan out to find food that once was shipped in.
Millions could and will die on that road. Where do they get safe water? The nearby stream or river is now a dump for raw sewage since purification plants are off line. Once stricken on the road by the results after drinking this water, where does one get help, basic medication, more water to keep you hydrated.
Within a month the next level of die off will be in full development. Those who survive the initial onset of illnesses from polluted water and food, and survive, will nevertheless be weakened, knock down a level. Even if they do get lucky and have food stockpiled, or find a source, chances are it will not be balanced at all and the first onset of nutritional imbalance will lower the immulogical system even further.
Now is the time that more serious diseases will appear. Pneumonia, especia lly in the winter due to exposure. More exotic and dangerous types of food poisoning such as salmonella due to a complete collapse of sanitation. Various forms of hepatitis, even diseases not heard of in a generation or more. . .measles, scarlet fever, and tuberculosis.
In addition, the number of injuries will have soared. Few of us today are truly use to the back breaking kind of manual labor of the 19th century. Even most laborers today use modern equipment to do 99% of the actual work. Unfamiliar with axes, shovels and saws, people will break bones, cut themselves, or just suddenly die from strain. And waiting now are the infectious diseases where an ordinary cut, once treated with a few stitches instead becomes an avenue for gangrene, a rusty nail is again a threat of tetanus.
And finally, violence against ourselves. At what point do we begin to kill each other for food, water, shelter? At what point does a small town mobilize, barricade itself in and make clear that any who enter will be shot because there is not enough food to share, and any new stranger might be a carrier of yet another disease.
By sixty days true starvation will be killing off millions and by 120 days mass starvation will be the norm. Those lucky enough to be in rich farm producing areas, with the knowledge of how to gather food by hand, and then preserve it, will have a temporary surplus, but even then, if they do not ration it out wisely, as did our colonial forefathers, they too will starve before the next crop is in the ground come spring.
Months later, yes help from old allies might be flooding in, but how to move it, distribute it and at the same time provide medical aid and also rebuild the electrical grid, step by step will still be overwhelming tasks.
As said before, “the death of a million is a statistic.” Our statistic could very well be that in a year’s time, nine out of ten Americans will be dead. Dead from but one weapon, our global position shattered forever as we revert back into a third rate power, if we even still survive as a united system of states.
:mrgreen:
