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. :)

Re:They have no plan

[PolygamousRanchKid]

I'll bet if you ask them about the status of their "plan", they will answer, "we are currently implementing plans to size the effort."

Re:They have no plan

[Dan East]

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

We're talking about a solar flare, not an EMP from a nuke at ground zero. The only reason massive solar flares damage things is because we have millions of miles of wires stretched across entire continents acting like massive antennas absorbing the energy from the flare on a massive, massive scale. The primary risk is the infrastructure itself going down - mainly in the form of tens of thousands of power transformers being destroyed. It's also possible that anything plugged into the grid can also be damaged, similar to a lightning strike, however in all likelihood the grid would be damaged before it can transfer the power of the solar flare into homes (it would be a slow build up over time - hours and maybe days - until it cooks the transformers and other equipment designed to regulate power).

So Faraday cages and the like to protect from solar flare are, well, about as useful as tin foil hats. Main thing is to disconnect your house from the grid via your main breakers when we know CME strike is imminent (and of course we will know about many hours in advance).

Re:They have no plan

[kenwd0elq]

I was going to say much the same thing, but you've said it better.

Just to add SOMETHING to the mix, however, I would have thought that hardening our electrical grid _MIGHT_ have been one of the things the gub'mint should have spent a little of the trillion wasted "stimulus" dollars on. But as Instapundit Glenn Reynolds puts it, that might have given real jobs to burly men rather than to the natural Democrat constituencies.

Further, as the recent article from Nature pointed out, ice cores from Greenland and Antarctica have recently revealed spikes in C-14 and Be-10, indicative of a truly MASSIVE solar storm, in 774 and 993, perhaps as much as 5 times more powerful than the Carrington Event. So, yeah, perhaps we should think about planning to begin.

Re:They have no plan

[kenwd0elq]

Auroras: spaceweather.com does daily aurora reports. Check them out. Auroras are not, generally, predictable; they are more common during times of geomagnetic storms, but sometimes happen when geomagnetic activity is low, and are sometimes absent when the activity level is high.

Re:They have no plan

[Anonymous Coward]

There is no need for "hardened" equipment, only properly working circuit breakers. The onset of a geomagnetic storm is slow, over the course of hours. All that you need is a circuit breaker that trips when excess current is seen. Stuff like this has already worked in the past, like the blackout in Quebec that was caused by a geomagnetic storm. Yes, the power goes out during the storm, but as soon as the storm is over you just reset the system and there is no permanent damage.

The only place there is serious risk is places where circuit breakers have not been properly set up. And it won't probably be the first ones that trip that cause the problem, but a cascade as the demand shifts to other lines. We've had this problem with non-solar related black outs cascading before, and often it involves circuit breakers that didn't have the correct current rating set and/or were poorly maintained. The cascading of loads is much faster than the timescale of the storm itself. There is also potential for issues on systems that have breakers based purely on AC signals that would miss the relatively DC effects of the storm, but this is pretty uncommon in first world power grids, and ultimately will trip AC circuits anyway when the transformers start to saturate.

Carrington event is not biggest possible.

[queazocotal]

http://arstechnica.co.uk/scien... - twice in the last thousand years or so, there has been an event around ten to twenty times larger, with a _much_ more energetic and destructive (to orbital things) spectrum.

Re:Carrington event is not biggest possible.

[Coren22]

What are you talking about?

Cell networks don't require GPS, so why would GPS going down have anything to do with cell service going down? If one of these events happened, the power network going down would be far worse than the cell or GPS networks going down. In fact, it is more likely that the power would go out, not the cell network until the batteries/generators died.

is it Space Weather

[turkeydance]

or Space Climate?

Is preparation a problem

[Dereck1701]

From what I understand there is really only one preparation, which is the entire reason the Space Weather Prediction Center was created. To know that it's coming and be ready to shut down the grid. This isn't an EMP, it won't overly effect individual electrical systems (like a Hospital running on a generator). It really only effects large networks which have enough surface area to serve as a receiver for the energy of the storm. The biggest threat is operators not reacting fast enough, which would cause the grid voltage to increase to levels that it wasn't designed for which would cause transformers, generators and other control/generation systems to burn out. If that happened replacement of the burnt out systems would take years.

Re:Is preparation a problem

[iggymanz]

No, there is a better preparation, ground resistors for transformers so the grid doesn't even need to be shut down. Solved problem, just need to spend the money and do it; estimated cost by Michio Kaku and other members of the American Physical Society was less than $200 million. chump change, cheap insurance.

Re:Is preparation a problem

[ClickOnThis]

This.

The electrical grids consist of cables that are strewn over long distances. They act like giant antennas that pick up the EM radiation from the flare and its interaction with the Earth's magnetic field. To protect the grid, you disconnect portions of it from each other, so that instead of a few giant "antennas", you have many more small ones. The current induced in the smaller "antennas" is much lower and far less harmful. And this is why prediction is so important: the early warning allows grid-operators to disconnect the grid in time to avoid catastrophic damage.

Satellites are also vulnerable because they can suffer deep static-charging that burns out electrical components. Unfortunately, forecasting doesn't help as much for this. The best you can do is study the magnitudes of expected events, engineer as well as you can against them, and plan for redundancy and replacement of the satellites as needed.

Re:Is preparation a problem

[ClickOnThis]

Geomagnetically-induced currents are quasi-DC because the inducing EM fields have low frequencies. The impedance of the transformers (Z = j*omega*L) drops with frequency (omega) and thus they become vulnerable to catastrophic failure due to high currents through the transformer coils.

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.

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

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

Sorry, but you and the mods need to learn there is a huge difference between an EMP and a geomagnetic storm, and that the latter has nothing to do with Faraday cages and telling everyone to shut things down.

Geomagnetic storms involve magnetic fields changing on the hour timescale. Induced voltage is proportional to the area of a loop of wire and inversely proportional to the timescale involved. That very slow timescale means the induced voltages will be insignificant for anything that doesn't involve many kilometers of wire covering enough ground that the area involved in the wire or the ground itself is large enough to cause significant changes in voltage.

There would be no impact on small scale electronics, especially anything disconnected from the grid. Faraday cages won't do much, as the skin depth of something that slow is several meters in a conductor. So it would be more like shielding something from a DC magnetic material, not that it would do any good as you would need to cover thousands of square kilometers of power distribution networks and ground.

What you need instead is simply circuit breakers that can cut connections when DC current is too high, and there are even ways of wiring the transformers to ground better to mitigate the need to cut power in the first place. Head knowledge of the storm is most useful for satellite controllers than can just put satellites to sleep, as they are dealing with increased flux of particles from solar wind and radio communication problems that have potential to create fake signals in the controllers and orientate them in a useless way. It is also useful to help be prepared for large scale tripping of breakers on a power grid so as to watch out for cascading problems from improperly configured breakers and connections.

EMPs from man made sources on the other hand are mostly much faster. Nuclear weapons can produce a couple different EMP components that have different timescales, including one that is slower and more like a geomagnetic storm. But the big concern there tends to be the much faster time scale, and faster timescale means it can induce voltages in much smaller things, like stuff that is disconnected from the grid, and things that wouldn't have a circuit breaker involved like your house wiring and power grids.

Geomagnetic storms is not an end of technology based life, but about disruptions (not complete destruction) of power distribution and satellites. It is a potential source of massive economic problems, but that involves a different kind of prep much more boring than what you would see in a TV show.

'thousand or so' ?

[oneiros27]

Um ... both of those were more than a thousand years ago.

I'm surprised you didn't mention the 1192 event. (Note that there's rebuttal to some things mentioned in that paper.)

You are dead wrong, CME can be very bad

[SuperKendall]

The only reason massive solar flares damage things is because we have millions of miles of wires stretched across entire continents acting like massive antennas

All electrical circuits are also antenna with a large enough power source "transmitting", and a Carrington level CME or larger is absolutely strong enough to affect individual electrical components.

Funny you should mention tin foil, because with some warning you could save a lot of stuff with a few layers of plastic alternating with aluminum foil, then sealed totally shut.

Deus Ex Machina

[PopeRatzo]

I'm less concerned about the threats from outer space than I am about the catastrophe we will cause ourselves.

http://graphics.latimes.com/ex...

Re:They have a plan allright...

[Anonymous Coward]

"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)"

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/International_response_to_Hurricane_Katrina
Some of them even have their own extensive wiki page.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Singaporean_response_to_Hurricane_Katrina

  Wow, looks like the whole world tried to help you out. People, money, equipment, doctors, emergency shelter and supplies! Of course the irony is with a solar flare event, most of the world will be hit. So they won't be able to help you out either.

  I do find Americans responses to disasters interesting. In many countries, it brings people together, often in the US (or at least some parts) it drives the nation apart.

If I were FEMA, I would reorganize thusly

[Applehu Akbar]

Develop field hospitals, bunkhouses, feeding centers, rescue bases, and other disaster handling gear designed as modules all in the standard 2TEU long freight container size. Store them in unused corners of military bases around the country. Make retainer arrangements with a well-distributed number of long-haul truckers such that when disaster occurs truckers who happen to be properly situated at the time will drive to a designated base, exchange their current load for a specified FEMA module, and haul it to the disaster zone. Meanwhile, their regular trailer is waiting at the pickup base under military protection for the duration.

For overseas needs, using the standard container size would allow modules to be carried by ship and rail anywhere in the world.

Putting 'Black Start' into everyone's vocabulary

[TheRealHocusLocus]

Take a moment to review NERC EOP-005-2: System Restoration from Blackstart Resources. If you live in North America, plans described in this document are your only real line of defense from the chaos and harm that may arise from grid-down disaster. Here is a peek at some software tools used by the industry and Black Start specific enhancements in progress [2013].

Note that NERC's Compliance and Enforcement process is voluntary. This means no one's going to jail for failure to implement these measures... and there are many in the industry who prefer it that way. We have witnessed the growth of the Department of Homeland Security way past its original mandate. Indeed there is a slow motion power grab in progress.

If you distrust large corporations and the consortiums they form then you're already suspicious. But few can argue that the grid is not resilient or well designed. In most cases frequency and voltage give operators all the feedback they need. But it has not ever been shut off completely, and the electrical equivalent of post-9/11 'ground stop' is neither practical nor possible to test black start capability... NERC does do regular computer simulations of country-wide restarts.

So if you are fortunate to live near one of the ~7,304 operational power plants in the United States (for example) and know some people who work there, you might pose these questions:

Has your plant participated in EOP-005 drills?
Has there ever been a country or region-wide drill where procedures are acted out in real time?
Do you feel the time presently devoted to this scenario is adequate, and plans are in place?
Do you have confidence that the grid could be restarted successfully?
Are there any 'old school' approaches to this problem you feel are not addressed or trained adequately?
To what extent are these black start procedures reliant on computers and functional computer networks?
What kinds of grid-wide inter-plant communications are in place for coordination when the grid is down?
Would any coordination efforts rely on carrier networks (telephone, cell, Internet) being up?

The very first BBC episode of Connections The Trigger Effect explores how we have become reliant on modern technology without needing to understand its intricacies, and uses the Northeast Blackout on November 9, 1965 and peoples' reactions to illustrate this.

If Black Start should fail or become delayed indefinitely, National Geographic: American Blackout is a documentary that dramatically explores effects of an extended grid outage. It is a tame outage -- no Winter freeze or volcanic ash --- with cyberattack as its rather specious scenario. At present the operational controls of power plants are diverse and there is a great deal of manual control, and a coordinated attack could only target the grid monitoring systems and communications between plants.

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.

Re:They have a plan allright...

[sphealey]

= = = This happened during Hurricane Sandy where people from NYC started begging/stealing/robbing rural farms. = = =

100% grade A baloney. This entire post is a radical survivalist's fantasy of what they think should have happened after a national-scale natural disaster, and bears no resemblance to what actually did happen. During the Sandy situation citizens of the New York City region showed for the second time in 14 years that they are far more resilient and cooperative than the average American. "+4 Interesting" - sheesh.

sPg

Re:They have a plan allright...

[samkass]

I live about 50 miles by road south of NYC. Closer as the crow flies. Nothing like this happened for Sandy (or Irene the year before). If anything, the event brought people closer together. Functioning power and cell phones were rare for a couple weeks, and gas got scarce fast (mostly due to lack of power for pumps). But we had a notable lack of marauders, and the neighbors showed a very strong preference for canned food over eating each other. People shared and generally acted like a right-wingers nightmare, coming together as a community to get through it together.

Re:They have a plan allright...

[Ol Olsoc]

100% grade A baloney. This entire post is a radical survivalist's fantasy of what they think should have happened after a national-scale natural disaster, and bears no resemblance to what actually did happen.

Yup. The prepper group is always projecting their lack of civilization onto others. But time and time again it's been proven that people don't act the way he thinks they will when the shit hits the fan.

Mad Max was a fun film and all, but it wasn't a documentary or a how-to.

Re:They have a plan allright...

[GLMDesigns]

Which farms did NYC people rob? I live in NYC. Except for a few areas (the Rockaways, Coney Island, Staten Island) NYC was not hit hard. And even in those areas things didn't break down to the level you're making it out to be. It was an adventure. There was water. There was food. There were good people helping out their neighbors.

Things did not fall apart. The center did hold.

Re:They have a plan allright...

[TwoEyedJack]

An EMP, whether from the sun or a hostile act, will make Sandy look like a Sunday School picnic.