American Blackout: This Is Why I Prep

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  • rwbow1969

    Get Wiffit
    Dec 10, 2011
    4,154
    Clearspring
    I like it when I hear people say "I'll just bug-out to the west, out in the mountains and live off the land." Good luck with that, remember all of us "Fudds" live out here.
     

    CrazySanMan

    2013'er
    Mar 4, 2013
    11,390
    Colorful Colorado
    Lights Out by Ted Koppel brought up a point I hadn't considered... even if we could buy replacement transformers (the really BIG ones), there is no way to transport them in a timely manner to many of the locations where they will be needed due to subsequent housing and construction, lack of railways, and other physical impediments.

    Damn, that's something I never thought of before. After an EMP there would be no way to transport the parts we need to rebuild the infrastructure. I suppose we could import vehicles from Europe or maybe areas of Mexico or Canada that weren't impacted by an EMP, but stuff would likely have to be brought in to central America and moved by road to America. There would be no heavy equipment to offload shipping containers in our ports and no equipment to aid aircraft landing on our runways.

    Scary stuff!
     

    Alphabrew

    Binary male Lesbian
    MDS Supporter
    Jan 27, 2013
    40,749
    Woodbine
    Lol at 1:25:00, just as the kid is ready to ventilate some robbers with an AK he gets a call from his mom that the power is back on.

    I don't think it makes sense to prep for any specific threat but it makes sense to have a savings account of supplys on hand for hard times, whatever hard times may look like. The Mormon church has an awesome prep guide.

    Thanks for posting OP
     

    VG-10

    Active Member
    Oct 5, 2012
    320
    Calvert County
    I'm a navy vet and have been an it specialist for a government contractor working on classified programs for 18 years. A grid failure, either from cyber attack, EMP, solar flare, or natural disaster scares the crap out of me. It's what I prep for. How serious is the threat? Years ago the Air Force shut down the Cheyene Mountain NORAD complex saying there wasn't a threat of nuclear war and it was too expensive to maintain. This summer they quietly began moving back in to it, citing EMP as the reason they needed to be protected under a mountain.

    I stockpile as much solar powered gear as I can, as well as rechargeable batteries. They won't all survive an EMP but they will a cyber attack or natural disaster.

    Something to consider is that if the grid goes down and three nights later you have lights on inside your house, you are going to be a prime target for the have-nots...




    Sent from my iPhone using Tapatalk

    Build a Faraday Cage. Your microwave might work for the smaller stuff if grounded properly.
     

    fred333

    Banned
    BANNED!!!
    Dec 20, 2013
    12,340
    In winter, at least, the issue of food spoilage isn't as bad. Imagine how bad things would get in major cities if the grid failed in the middle of a July or August heat wave. Every fridge and freezer would have to get dumped out after 24 hours, and all that food would have to be collected immediately and disposed of before it became a biohazard. You can safely assume that's not going to happen, and that means decay and disease won't be far behind. One freezer full of decaying meat is a horrific event you'll never forget - I can't imagine what millions of them all going bad at once would be like.

    Just bury it....along with the bodies. Problem solved. Next...
     

    fred333

    Banned
    BANNED!!!
    Dec 20, 2013
    12,340
    Judge Jeanine Pirro hosted a show on this subject. One expert said, some of the larger transforms in the grid there is not backup for and would take China or Japan to build on maybe six months. :tdown:

    I believe they come from Germany, but point taken.
     

    fred333

    Banned
    BANNED!!!
    Dec 20, 2013
    12,340
    It is sad, very sad that there has not been a mandate or law passed that EVERY new construction, either residential, commercial or industrial, must included in the design, either solar panels covering 70% of available/open roof structures or wind turbines on the property. In DC alone, in 2014 there were 13,277 permits for new home construction. This is one area that Big Brother should intervene, if they weren't being corrupted by oil/coal/natural gas special interest groups.

    With the average cost of a solar power system between $15k~$30k, do you really want the government to tack that (as a mandate) onto the cost of your home? Are you a green socialist or something?
     

    CrazySanMan

    2013'er
    Mar 4, 2013
    11,390
    Colorful Colorado
    Build a Faraday Cage. Your microwave might work for the smaller stuff if grounded properly.

    Yeah, I've actually got some stuff stored in a metal garbage can that is grounded. I am always on the lookout for microwaves that are being thrown away, to use the shell as a faraday cage and to use the transformers to make these:





     

    CrazySanMan

    2013'er
    Mar 4, 2013
    11,390
    Colorful Colorado
    With the average cost of a solar power system between $15k~$30k, do you really want the government to tack that (as a mandate) onto the cost of your home? Are you a green socialist or something?

    Not only that, but solar and wind generating stuff for consumers can actually feed the grid with power. While this seems like a good idea in a doomsday scenario, it is deadly for the workers who have to work on the power lines every day. It becomes more and more difficult to isolate equipment to work on it safely when every house is putting power onto the grid. You need a good isolation switch on each house, then you need to create government inspections to verify that the switches are working, and you need to set up the whole government infrastructure to create the regulations and to certify the inspectors and to track each individual citizen and when their switch inspection is due and to collect the fee we will be charged for the inspection and license for the switch for a year and...
     

    Minuteman

    Member
    BANNED!!!
    I like it when I hear people say "I'll just bug-out to the west, out in the mountains and live off the land." Good luck with that, remember all of us "Fudds" live out here.

    Yep, this.

    I don't like the term fudds, some people use it in a derogatory sense. For a long time most 'hunters' didn't join our 2A fight because they didn't believe the anti-Constitutionalist in Maryland would ever go after them or their 'hunting' long guns; well now they are!!

    A federal agency did a survey asking their employees if there was a major disaster that forced them to leave the area (bug-out), where would they go? Overwhelming majority said 'westward' (western Md, WVA). If you don't have friends there, and a plan to MUTUALLY support, you better not even think of squatting on someone's land. If you find a friend willing to host you (in their home, or let you camp on their property), you better bring something to help them, and be ready/able to join/support their plan to defend the property, grow food, fetch water, or anything else they need.
     

    W2D

    Ultimate Member
    Dec 2, 2015
    2,074
    Escaped MD for FL
    People tend to forgets few things. Sure our power grid is crap. But it wouldn't stay down for long. That being said, what you should have concerns is that any day, the Sun can release waves and it would effect the whole planet. They think it would be a world wide EMP. Now that should worry you. This thing about about someone doing it, not so much. Few days, maybe a week or so.. Heck I didn't have power for 10 days because of a hurricane....


    Sent from my iPhone using Tapatalk


    A solar flare like in the 1800s would do the trick. That strength again would take out a lot of transformers. The months it would take to manufacture and rebuild would be chaos. A friend of mine repairs power substations, and said the system is falling apart from zero maintenance. Propane in a BIG tank and generator seems to be the way to go. Even natural gas will go out eventually .
     

    Blacksmith101

    Grumpy Old Man
    Jun 22, 2012
    22,154
    If the grid goes out no one will go to work. When it does not come back on people will stay home to protect their families. No work means no deliveries of food to stores, the water supply and sewage systems failing, very soon people will start to riot and loot (in the cities first), unsanitary conditions will lead to wide spread sickness and disease, no one will come to help you even if you could call for help. You and your friends and neighbors will be on their own. The sound of a running generator, lights on after dark, or a column of smoke will become Maggot Magnets attracting the predators in the area.

    The time to plan and prepare is now. Even a little preparation puts you ahead of those who do nothing. Knowledge and skills trump everything else because those can't be taken from you and are no use without you and can be traded for what you need. A like minded community with a variety of resources and abilities has a better chance of survival than an individual.

    Plan to shelter in place until the dust settles because travel will quickly become very difficult and dangerous.
     

    CrazySanMan

    2013'er
    Mar 4, 2013
    11,390
    Colorful Colorado
    Another thing I do to prepare for a long term grid outage is buy books. Today if something breaks, or I need to learn how to do something I do what we all do - I consult the Google. But without teh intarwebs we won't be able to do that anymore. How do I learn how sharpen the blade on a crosscut saw or know when to plant a certain vegetable or how to tan the hide of that deer I just shot if I can't Google it? I've got a few shelves filled with books that show how to do all of these and more. Cooking, plumbing, mechanics, hunting and fishing, gardening, carpentry, etc. Get some books that show you how to do things without electricity and tuck them away, just in case. My prepper library is filled with books on skills from the stone age to today.
     

    MDFF2008

    Ultimate Member
    Aug 12, 2008
    24,735
    Buy an old microwave and keep some solar powered gear in it. The inside of a microwave is a farody cage and should ground out an EMP.

    You won't be able to store much, but maybe a laptop or portable media player, sat phone and a solar charger.

    Sent from my SCH-I545 using Tapatalk
     

    Half-cocked

    Senior Meatbag
    Mar 14, 2006
    23,937
    Buying old microwaves to use as Faraday cages is like buying junked cars to use as greenhouses.

    ANY metal container with a tight-fitting metal lid is JUST AS GOOD IF NOT BETTER at being a de facto Faraday cage, as a microwave oven.

    Find a galvanized metal trash can with a lid. Boom, done.
     

    Bolts Rock

    Living in Free America!
    Apr 8, 2012
    6,123
    Northern Alabama
    Give me a quick run down on how this happens

    OK, layman's terms.

    The entire grid is interconnected. It is mostly computer controlled. Security is only as good as the weakest link and most of the small consumer level links might as well have signs that say "Enter the network here". A sophisticated attack would enter through those weak links and propagate through the control systems of the power grid similar to how we and the Israelis did with Stuxnet against Iran complete with "blank screen" deceptions to the monitoring stations. Don't think for a second various potential enemies haven't mapped most of the system. Assume a successful penetration and attack. Now things get complex.....

    Keep in mind I work in the signal strength realm where we derate everything and wire is insulated and we have thermal engineers who figure out how much heat we produce and can tolerate. Derating allows safety margins for heat, current carrying capacity, voltage arc prevention from insulation breakdown and all that good stuff. High voltage transmission lines are way different and are not insulated (it would melt off). Power generation is a whole different field but I grasp the concepts, hopefully I can explain them simply enough.

    Look at high tension transmission lines, see them sag? They are not under "high tension" in the mechanical sense, tension is an archaic term for voltage and those transmission lines can be hundreds of KV. You might notice some days the lines sag more than others, that's from heat but not the heat of the day, the heat of the cable caused by resistance and current flow. Ohm's Law is E=IR (voltage = current [amperage] times resistance [ohms]) and EI=P or IsqR=P (voltage times current = power [watts] or current squared times resistance = power). You can only push so much through a wire similar to water through a hose. Voltage is pressure, current is flow (gallons per minute) and resistance is hose diameter....to a hose pressure doesn't really matter as long as the end is open and the flow rate can be drained out that end easily but crank up the flow rate too far and the hose has issues. With wire you need greater diameter to allow greater current flow, wire doesn't care how much voltage you push through it as long as it can't arc from the wire to something else there is no voltage issue. Conduction is not 100% efficient, all wire has resistance and the result of pushing current through wire is waste heat, push more current the wire gets hotter, as it gets hotter it expands and starts to sag, it gets hot enough to ignite vegetation easily, it can get hot enough to melt itself. The August 2003 northeast blackout was caused by an overheated line sagging, setting a tree on fire, melting the line and causing an automatic rerouting of power that caused a cascade failure.

    Now we add source (generator) and load avenues of attack. In the high power realm they need to be balanced. If the source tries to push too much into the lines for the load, the source starts to have thermal problems, do it just right and transformers fail. If the load tries to pull too much through the lines the lines get too hot. An attack can reroute things to put more load on a set of lines and reroute the sources to those lines thus causing the lines to sag and either start fires or melt; you can again cause transformer failures at the load end. This can lead to cascade failures and an attack can be setup to induce this deliberately.

    Then you have the February 2014 rifle attack on a substation. A few small teams can damage enough substations to induce a cascade failure. They just have to know which ones to take out and do so within a few minutes of each other. Couple that with a cyber attack and we're screwed.

    Then there's what we did with Stuxnet that used out of phase commands to motors causing them to literally tear themselves apart. At the simplest level motors and generators are the same thing. Motors are fed power and they spin, generators are spun and they make power. Both like to be kept in a steady state with smooth, gradual changes in speed. When a motor has power removed and spins down it creates a back EMF (electromotive force) in the circuit, usually it's just noise level and doesn't hurt anything. In a generator back EMF can be a problem, they need smooth and properly timed load switching. Generators either move a coil past a magnet or a magnet past a coil, the coil moving through the magnetic field induces current flow in the coil, this of course ramps up then down as the field strength changes, this is called phasing. Now start switching the load slightly out of phase, back EMF affects the magnetic fields and starts throwing mechanical imbalances into the generator; generator parts are huge as in massive and you start to beat up the bearings. This is a bad thing. One national lab out in Idaho deliberately destroyed a generator doing exactly this a few years ago.

    People tend to forgets few things. Sure our power grid is crap. But it wouldn't stay down for long. That being said, what you should have concerns is that any day, the Sun can release waves and it would effect the whole planet. They think it would be a world wide EMP. Now that should worry you. This thing about about someone doing it, not so much. Few days, maybe a week or so.. Heck I didn't have power for 10 days because of a hurricane....
    Sent from my iPhone using Tapatalk

    Nope, the lead times to manufacture new transformers and generators is on average 18 months. Then you get to transport those 400,000 to 600,000 pound behemoths to where they're needed. There are 30 railcars rated to moved them in US; even fewer trucks that can do it. Now add in bridge and other inspections that need to be performed before trying to move that much weight over them. These are not airliftable items.

    Both are excellent scenario-based narratives. Scary.

    Anything controlled by a computer that isn't totally isolated can be hacked.

    And that assumes that China would be willing to build and sell them to us. There's no guarantee about that. Or, maybe they would have a vested interest in BEING the attacker... not only could they topple our country, they could profit by selling us the replacement parts.

    Lights Out by Ted Koppel brought up a point I hadn't considered... even if we could buy replacement transformers (the really BIG ones), there is no way to transport them in a timely manner to many of the locations where they will be needed due to subsequent housing and construction, lack of railways, and other physical impediments.

    China, Germany, Japan and Korea are the big makers of them. We can still make a few but not near enough to cover our asses.
     

    Bolts Rock

    Living in Free America!
    Apr 8, 2012
    6,123
    Northern Alabama
    Buying old microwaves to use as Faraday cages is like buying junked cars to use as greenhouses.

    ANY metal container with a tight-fitting metal lid is JUST AS GOOD IF NOT BETTER at being a de facto Faraday cage, as a microwave oven.

    Find a galvanized metal trash can with a lid. Boom, done.

    Improve on that with a wrap of aluminum tape with conductive adhesive over the closure.
     

    CrazySanMan

    2013'er
    Mar 4, 2013
    11,390
    Colorful Colorado
    Give me a quick run down on how this happens

    Any mechanical or electrical device that is controlled by a computer can be destroyed by a computer. On a simple scale, a computer virus can drive a computer monitor at frequency rates that is cannot handle, causing it to burn itself up. A computer virus can give malformed read and write commands to a hard drive and cause the heads to move erratically and eventually fail and crash the drive. A computer virus can alter the output of a computers power supply and either fry the parts instantly or slowly over time.

    Every time an electrical motor starts it requires a large startup voltage surge to power the coils and initiate movement in the rotor. When you have a system like your heat pump that is controlled by a smart thermostat a computer virus can instruct it to rapidly cycle on and off and that startup voltage will fry the motor, maybe even start a fire.

    Now step up in scale again. A computer virus could shut off cooling valves to a nuclear reactor but report to the operators that they are open and the temperature is normal. This could cause a melt down while all teh monitoring systems showed all was normal. A virus could order a power generator to spin faster than it was designed to, which would seize up bearings and burn up the generator, again probably starting fires.

    All a virus needs to do is cause something to move faster than it is supposed to or cause a power supply to apply more power than it is supposed to and you will have a computer physically destroy equipment.
     

    Lucca1

    Ultimate Member
    MDS Supporter
    Feb 9, 2013
    1,002
    Behind Enemy Lines
    Another thing I do to prepare for a long term grid outage is buy books. Today if something breaks, or I need to learn how to do something I do what we all do - I consult the Google. But without teh intarwebs we won't be able to do that anymore. How do I learn how sharpen the blade on a crosscut saw or know when to plant a certain vegetable or how to tan the hide of that deer I just shot if I can't Google it? I've got a few shelves filled with books that show how to do all of these and more. Cooking, plumbing, mechanics, hunting and fishing, gardening, carpentry, etc. Get some books that show you how to do things without electricity and tuck them away, just in case. My prepper library is filled with books on skills from the stone age to today.
    This is great advice. I also download and print as many resources as I can. It's amazing what you can find online.

    http://www.survivorlibrary.com
    http://preppers.info/Free_Downloads.html
    http://preppers.info/Links.html#Disaster_Preparedness

    I keep a copy of this on my phone.

    fm_21-76-1survival, evasion and recovery


    https://www.google.com/url?sa=t&sou...ggeMAA&usg=AFQjCNHTGa4pouLjCOklVA2pfOM0RtXt3g
     

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