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An Exercise To Model a "Solar Radiation Katrina"
Hugh Pickens writes in with an update on the warnings we discussed a year back about the dangers of a "solar Katrina." Now NPR is reporting on a tabletop exercise mounted in Boulder, Colorado by government workers attempting to model the effects of a worst-case solar electromagnetic storm. "...an exercise held in Boulder, Colorado, has investigated what might happen if the Earth were struck by a solar storm as intense as the huge storms that occurred in 1921 and 1859 — a sort of solar Katrina — and researchers found that the impact is likely to be far worse than in previous solar storms because of our growing dependence on satellites and other electronic devices that are vulnerable to electromagnetic radiation. 'In many ways, the impact of a major solar storm resembles that of a hurricane or an earthquake,' says FEMA Administrator Craig Fugate, except that a solar Katrina would cause damage in a much larger area — power could be knocked out almost simultaneously in countries from Sweden to Canada and the US. In the exercise, the first sign of trouble came when radiation began disrupting radio signals and GPS devices, says Tom Bogdan, who directs the Space Weather Prediction Center. Ten or 20 minutes later electrically charged particles 'basically took out' most of the commercial satellites that transmit telephone conversations, TV shows, and huge amounts of data we depend on in our daily lives. But the worst damage came nearly a day later, when the solar storm began to induce electrical currents in high voltage power lines strong enough to destroy transformers around the globe, leaving millions of people in northern latitudes without power."
I would expect CD-ROMs and DVD-ROMs to be reasonably safe (though any reading devices might be temporarily disabled or permanently damaged.) But what about HDDs? Are they sufficiently shielded against this?
Yes, losing power is a serious issue that will cost lives and losing GPS etc. would be very bad, too. But more and more of our cultural and scientific achievements are stored primarily on magnetic drives that may or may not be suitably shielded. How much at risk are those data, or should I invest in lead shielding for my backup storage drive?
Do we not have any power transmission systems? Or just donkeys running on treadmills attached to dynamos? How will the such a solar storm affect our donkeys?
Um, 100 million people without power for a few months is a much bigger deal than a few tens of thousands who chose to live below sea level, or chose to stop insuring their house when they no longer owed any payments on it.
The key problem about the flare is the rate of production of transformers -- it would be literally months before much of the northern part of the US and Canada got power back.
If that happens during the winter, you're talking a LOT of people freezing to death.
The "Katrina" metaphor is comparing the impact of the disasters on our society. A big solar storm could be much more widespread and damaging than previous blackouts, and end up killing quite a few people. Nobody's suggesting that it will literally cause floods and random physical destruction.
So if only a quarter of the planet is left powerless for weeks or months during the winter, this would somehow be less severe than a single city getting flooded?
$_ = "wftedskaebjgdpjgidbsmnjgcdwatb"; tr/a-z/oh, turtleneck Phrase Jar!/; print
As a genuine cyborg, my first concern about such "electrical storm/attack" fears & warnings is their impact on pacemakers and other life-sustaining electronic devices.
Anyone have meaningful commentary thereon?
Can we get a "-1 Wrong" moderation option?
You're mixing up two effects. You're correct that the direct EM radiation would affect largely only the sunlit portion of the Earth. However, the "second punch" of these events is the large burst of protons that arrives the next day -- it's the solar wind, but several orders of magnitude larger than usual.
These protons are affected by the geomagnetic field, and (to simplify a lot) rain down in large regions generally centered around the magnetic poles (cf. the auroral ovals), where they induce very large currents in long conductors like power lines, leading to general power failures that could not be easily repaired.
This wouldn't be your garden-variety blackout -- it would require physical replacement of massive equipment for which there are no spares readily available -- at least not in the quantities needed. Large numbers of people -- entire provinces and states in North America, and likely entire nations in northern Europe -- would be without power for months while new equipment was manufactured and installed. This would lead to mass migrations out of these areas, which would lead to social disruption and significant loss of life as critical systems, whose backup generators and other emergency systems were not designed for such an extended outage, failed.
I was in south Florida for Hurricane Wilma, and I can report to you that the social structure of the region almost broke down during the week or two the region was without electricity -- and this was a natural disaster, albeit a severe one, that people understood and had largely prepared for. Power was restored relatively quickly then, because (a) the causes, downed power lines, were easy to find and repair, and (b) there was a massive influx of utility workers from the rest of the country to help out. In a solar flare scenario, the cause would be much harder to fix, and there would be a much larger affected area (and, consequently, a much smaller unaffected area from which to draw support).
or chose to stop insuring their house when they no longer owed any payments on it
Although this doesn't affect your main point, it's worth mentioning that a lot of the folks who got no or a minimal insurance payment were insured against flood damage, but the insurance companies found creative ways not to pay. An example of the kind of thinking that was employed: your neighbor's house crashing through your living room isn't water damage, so we don't have to pay the flood policy on that damage. But because the incident in question was caused by a flood rather than a fire or tornado, we also don't have to pay the regular homeowner's policy. Therefore, you get only payment for cleaning up the water damage. Another common tactic was to refuse to pay unless the homeowner could provide documentation for their policy, which was of course lost in the flood.
In short, insurance offered very limited at best protection for New Orleans homeowners.
I am officially gone from
My own experience says otherwise.
Flood Insurance isn't the Insurance Company's money - it's federal dollars. So the insurance companies had very little incentive to not hand it out like candy.
I got a much larger payout on my flood insurance than on my regular homeowner's insurance, even though the water damage wasn't really all that severe on my house.
"I do not agree with what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it"
...as a Republican, am I supposed to believe that scientists understand solar weather or not?
the problem is when the induction causes the transformers at the ends of high tensions wires to blow, with no replacement available
you can build circuit breakers into such transformers, but a cost-benefit-risk analysis hasn't sided yet on the side of caution, even though the cost is not great. and no, we don't have a ready supply of the right transformers sitting around
paradoxically, the poorest nations of the world will do fine, because they are less dependent on electricty and electronics, and are closer to the equator. while the electricity and electronics dependent northern hemisphere will experience severe long lasting societal shocks, involving the mass disruption of the internet, other communications, and all the vital uses the northern hemisphere has built into their electrical grid
so we're all screwed when (not if) the next carrington effect is observed, out of simple laziness and complacency. we have had plenty warning, and we have freely chosen not to protect ourselves from this threat with a simple low cost circuit breaker style set up
http://passingstrangeness.wordpress.com/2009/04/15/the-carrington-flare/
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
Asia and Africa lose electricity and there goes all those lovely cell phones, or any phones. Asian cities lose power to keep those sewage plants and water supplies running and disease starts taking hold in a big way. Asia loses electricity and you can't even use trains very effectively because you use electricity to control traffic, so food and medicine supplies are diminished.
Thinking this would only effect white people in Europe and the Americas is racist nonsense. Thinking that people in Asia and Africa don't depend on electricity and petroleum as much as Europeans and people in the Americas is potentially dangerous delusion.
Please do not read this sig. Thank you.
nobody is going to be rewinding transformers like macgyver. that's a serious buttload of skilled work, with equipment and supplies that is not easily at hand
furthermore, the canada disruption you are referring to is tiny in comparison to a carrington effect-level event. it won't be days at most, but weeks at a minimum. we simply haven't invested in the transformers protection or backup or the transformer repair skill/ capacity
and no one is saying people will just be sitting around twiddling their thumbs. in fact, some will be emphatically looting. and the police cruisers will soon run out of gas since most stations use electric gas pumps. nevermind that after the generators die in a few days/ hours, communications will be down across radio, television, and internet, so the police, and the population, will be left to guess what is going on and when everything will be back to normal. throw in a little hysteria, and you can imagine the results in major cities
people WILL freeze to death, simply because they will NOT just sit around, but panic and venture out in the cold out of complete ignorance and fright
do you consider me alarmist? out of intellectual honesty, i will say it is possible i am straying too far into alarmism in my comments
however, to whatever degree i am straying into alarmism, you are straying much further and much more dangerously into complacency on this issue, that is for sure. in other words, your complacency here is far more dangerous than my alarmism
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
Rewinding uses the same windings. Not new ones..
Yeah, I'm sure that electrical arcs and overheating don't damage copper wires at all. They'll still be able to handle thousands of amps. Just reuse it!
Considering that big portions of power grids have crumbled like dominoes on their own just because of minor instabilities in normal generation, I don't think its safe to say that safety systems would work in a worst-case solar storm.
BTW, I saw manufacturing power transformers on one of those "how they make it" shows. It wasn't exactly a simple process. They used special machines to precisely arrange the rather thick, inflexible "wires" (more like thin bars) around the core. This isn't a toy train set.
Was about a mysterious EMP that knocked out all electricity networks and computers in the USA and difficulty of returning to pre-1880 lifestyle.
Since when did solar flares change tides and throw debries around to cause massive flooding, and random destruction.
They don't. They only take out services. Over VERY large areas, for long periods of time. Your house is safe, but it'll be cold and dark and no one will answer the phone at Dominos.
With Katrina, there was some warning, and there were safe areas 50 miles away that still had power, water, food, and communications. People could be evacuated to those areas. Katrina was a big problem over a small area, and people survived by moving short distances to areas that had services.
A solar geomagnetic storm could be a smaller problem over a much larger area. Imagine the power going out at every house north of the Mason Dixon line in the US and up into Canada. Where do you send people? Nowhere. You tell them to stay the hell home. But what are they going to eat and drink, and how will they stay warm?
The important thing is that power, water, heat, telephone, Internet, and even radio communications (including aviation navigation and shortwave) could all go away at once, and some or all of them might be out for an extended period of time. It could literally take months to restore services to some areas. And this could potentially be on a continental scale. Additionally, an X-Class geomagnetic storm can damage unshielded electronics. Your PC, cell phone, modem, etc may or may not work even if power and Internet come back. Your car may not function even if fuel is readily available. Your backup generator may not start. They may all need expensive repairs, and you'll have to wait a while because everyone else will be in the same situation.
There's no need for panic, of course, but TFA doesn't mention panic. It mentions preparedness. I think it's perfectly prudent to prepare in much the same way as you would for a hurricane or major snowstorm, because you may suffer from the same lack of readily available food, water, and heat. Except something like this cannot be predicted, so you have to be prepared all the time. Oh, and you don't need plywood, unless you plan on burning it for heat. :)
This is more of a city problem, because city services might go away in a hurry, and a dense population means more immediate dependence on common resources that will go away. The water will run out in the first week, if not sooner. Food before that, probably, but people can get by without food for a few days.
More rural folks have wells we can dip for safe drinking water, campstoves with lots of fuel we can use for cooking, and heaters that don't depend on electricity but are designed to be used safely indoors. This will be an annoyance, little more. We get power outages and major snowstorms all the time, and we don't really need to go anywhere for a while if things get bad - we'll just hunker down and start rationing out the food we canned away or put in the deep freezer.
It's simple. Take your dwelling (apartment, house, condo, whatever). Play a mental game where you have to depend ONLY on whatever you have on your property for one month. If that doesn't concern you, you're probably good, as long as your neighbors have gone through the same mental exercise OR you are better armed than they are. :)
"This post contains words, known to the State of California to cause thought. Wash brain thoroughly after reading."
Yes, I can. I can also choose to live outside tornado alley, or away from the San Andreas fault, or inside a gated community.
But it's naive to think everybody in America has the same options as the average slashdotter. Many of the people who "chose" not to leave NOLA in the time leading up to Katrina couldn't. Some didn't have money for bus tickets, or a way to transport a bed-ridden family member. Disregard them if it lets you sleep better, but those are facts.
People don't "choose" to live in trailer parks or crime-ridden neighborhoods or their car purely out of foolishness; people with less money have fewer options. Blame them for their "choices" if you want, but if they could afford a safer place they'd choose it.
In any natural disaster, the poor will be disproportionately affected. It's just a market reality.
I lived in a suburb of Detroit during the rolling blackout in the northeast. Drives that would normally take 10 minutes took hours, there were lines at the gas stations, people who didn't have cash on hand were scrambling to borrow money because they couldn't get money from the ATM, etc.
If you live in a colder climate, it might be better to just buy the generator. Burning those stock certificates will only keep you warm for a short while.
It's not a matter of ability, it's a matter of population density. If you have access to enough food and water to live for several months and are reasonably assured there is no meaningful competition for those resources, you'll be fine.
In more rural areas, this is a non-issue. I live on 3 acres of land that include a dug well I can dip from, and I'm used to power outages and have 550 gallons of Kerosene for my furnace that can also be used to keep my KeroSun going for the better part of a year. My house water pipes are designed to be drained to keep them from freezing in an extended outage. I have a deep freeze full of food (I'd have to cook it as it thaws and preserve it that way), and lots of canned vegetables and fruit in the basement. I could probably get through an entire winter in reasonable comfort.
In a microapartment in the middle of the city, dependent on electricity for heat and city lines for water, something like this could turn into a big problem, really fast. They are currently being sustained by water that is treated and pumped to them. If power goes out, so do the treatment plants and the pumps. So you have to find untreated but safe water, and get it to them or them to it.
And keep in mind, power outages caused by geomagnetic storms can be continental in scale, and the damage can take weeks or months to repair. It's not likely, but it is possible, and this article is about a not-unrealistic worst case scenario. So you aren't going to be able to depend on much of anything.
How do you get fresh water every day to a city of 5 million people when there isn't electricity available for 500 miles in any direction? An 18-wheeler can haul about 8000 gallons of water. Assuming each person is limited to 2 quarts a day of water, you need over 300 trips per day. How do you distribute it? Can you sustain that for months? If you can't, where do you evacuate them all to? Is there enough water to sustain them? Is it safe, or does it need to be treated or boiled? Do they know how to get it without fouling it?
Now, say this happens in January. How do you keep them warm?
This article is about preparedness. Your house is fine, no need to grab the tent. Just be prepared for no electricity and no water for a month or so, and food may be hard to come by. Encourage your neighbors to do the same, or arm yourself. No big deal.
"This post contains words, known to the State of California to cause thought. Wash brain thoroughly after reading."