Feds Have a Plan For Catastrophic Solar Flares (digitaljournal.com)

New submitter Steve Sacco, referencing the newly released National Space Weather Strategy and the National Space Weather Action Plan, written in anticipation of large-scale disruptions from a solar flare or similar event, writes: Released on October 28, 2015, the White House plan involves the coordination of agencies from the federal level, state level, and including emergency managers, academia, the media, the insurance industry, nonprofit organizations and the private sector, all in preparation for the worst-case scenario possible, such as the Carrington Event that took place in 1859.

Comments

They have no plan

[fyngyrz]

If you actually read TFA and TFD's, there is no plan. What there is, is an outline for a plan. This is about what they should do to prepare a plan -- it's not an actual plan.

Once they have a plan, then they need specially prepared gear, vehicles, etc. They don't have enough hardened / sheltered "stuff" to even have a hope of dealing with a really significant event.

If you don't have solar power stored in a nice dark box inside a Faraday cage, along with (at least) a radio and anything electrical you need to survive*, you won't even have the beginnings of what you'll need to going to do well -- and the government is not, in any way, prepared to help you out at this time. And your neighbors... they aren't going to be happy you're okay, and they are not, either.

* I do... I photograph auroras for fun, and in learning about them... and as I am both a ham and an engineer... it does tend to provoke some paranoia. And as for the neighbors... this is Montana. :)

That's not a plan, that's a plan to plan

[Etcetera]

To be fair, there's not much incredibly unique about solar weather like this that wouldn't apply to a general electrical catastrophe from an intentional EMP. There's a chance of getting some notice notice, but the practical effects of that will be slim other than telling anyone with a Faraday Cage to close and everyone else to attempt to power everything down first.

Whether it's a rogue state exploding a few nukes in space over the US (no targetting needed, just fire it up from a shipping container at set it to explode about 100mi high), or the Sun taking it out, the end is the same... pretty complete collapse of infrastructure everywhere at once. Think Katrina, but simultaneously across the county. What infrastructure remains working probably won't stay functioning for long with all of the other issues going on...

The logistics of rebuilding will be immense and measured in years, and that's assuming we have enough working equipment after that to "reboot civilization", as it were, and some other -- better equipped -- country with a few working jets doesn't decide to take advantage of things. The military will have properly shielded equipment in many cases, but it's an open question how long and in what way a chain of command can survive when disconnection is universal and recovery is years away.

The rural areas will be survivable; the coastal cities and anywhere where survival depends on electricity and food transportation logistics will not be.

The book One Second After is a decent look at what it might be like, although I have faith that there will be more HAMs than he seems to think who might be able to help with long distance communication in the aftermath. Or you could just watch reruns of Revolution and ignore the mystical nanite techno-babble and focus on the sociology of the collapse.

They have a plan allright...

[Anonymous Coward]

The preppers learned from disasters (Katrina is one, but the Iraq and Afghanistan theaters also showed what happened when there is no government) a number of lessons:

1: There will be marauders. Ask the guy who defended his house from gangs wanting his place, but couldn't stop them from burning his place down out of spite.

2: People will panic and do very insane things. 24 hours after food trucks stop coming in, there will be a realistic re-enactment of the Donner Party on a larger scale. Not because people are actually truly starving, but they believe they are since getting a hamburger at McDonald's is impossible

What causes the panic? Things like no running water, shit backing up from their toilets and flooding the bathrooms and basements, basements unusable due to ejector/sump pump failures, no electricity, and if someone pulls out a generator, someone else with a gun will relieve the person of said generator at once. Cell phones are nice, but when towers are down, they are not going to help much.

Once people are paniced, well, expect every corner store, liquor store, gas station, sporting goods store, and Wally World to be emptied.

Here in the US, we saw this before with the NYC power outages.

3: The fires will start. At first, people will start fires... then realize there is no water to put them out, and once gas mains start going up, major parts of a city will be rendered uninhabitable by fire and smoke damage. The remaining areas will get fought over, likely burned (again, like in Katrina, the attitude of "if I can't have it, nobody can" will take over.)

4: People will start spreading outwards to look for food (and people to rob, well.. because there are no cops, so they can.) This happened during Hurricane Sandy where people from NYC started begging/stealing/robbing rural farms. It was learned that 50 or so miles was a zone where the average vehicle ran out of fuel, and farms outside of that radius didn't have the vagabond problems that farms and rural areas closer to urban areas had.

As for government intervention, they are not going to send troops into a city that is rioting, and with gangbangers with more guns than the national guard has. Instead, they will just seal all exits, wait a few weeks until everyone kills each other off, then send in troops to handle the remaining 5-10% of the people who have survived. Roads will be blockaded, preventing people who are starving from going past that (proven in Katrina.) Fires? As someone who evacuated from Central Texas fires, they likely will not be bothered with until they get burned out. There will be plenty of blockades and detours though.

I wouldn't expect any help from the government. Remember, during Katrina, Sandy, and other disasters, no other country offered aid to the US (which is ironic because the US spends a lot of cash on aiding other nations), so expect to count on youself and your family, and nobody else. There is a reason why prepping has gone from an extremely, wingnut concept to something fairly mainstream.

1970s Solar Flare Telco Cable Crash

[billstewart]

I used to work at Bell Labs, in a department that had a bunch of nuclear physicists doing research into EMP, because the government wanted studies about hardening their networks in case of nuclear war, and a big thing that influenced them was a telco cable that crashed during a mid-1970s solar flare. It was back when long-haul cable systems were still copper, before fiber had replaced them, and a few hundred miles of copper wire becomes a very big antenna if you hit it with enough of a magnetic field, and there's enough voltage difference between it and ground to fry the equipment at both ends. They had a huge amount of data to work with, and they also studied the effects of EMP on various pieces of equipment, and ways to design the networks to be resilient against suddenly getting big holes in it.

Fiber optics helps with a lot of this (but obviously that doesn't help the electric companies.) On the other hand, during the 60s and 70s, the phone networks were changing from electromechanical phone switches like relays and crossbars, which were easy to protect, to transistors and integrated circuits that just aren't, and you're not going to put it all in Faraday cages, especially these days when there's no longer a Soviet Union that's likely to nuke the US. And the Bell System divestiture meant that a lot of the interconnections between local telco switches were no longer available to act as backups for the now-multiple long-distance companies, but the switching logic was starting to get smarter so there were more option for rerouting traffic than with the older dumber switches. Lots of change, and then all this Internet stuff happened.