I fear the USA being hit by an electromagnetic pulse (EMP). That fear motivated me to start prepping years ago, and it’s still something that motivates me today.
Let’s talk about fear
The word “fear” is one that most of us shy away from using about ourselves.
For social and psychological reasons, it’s a powerful word with very negative vibes around it when talking about ourselves. We hide behind synonyms when talking about what we are afraid of because it “sounds better” or makes us feel “stronger” about ourselves.
Angst, anxiety, concern, dismay, doubt, dread, panic, suspicion, unease, worry… all of these words we are perfectly comfortable pinning on our own emotions, but fear? No. Fear is something that other people do, not us.
I fear an EMP though.
Seriously.
No other word really describes both my thoughts and my feelings about the subject.
Why? Because it’s the fastest man-made way that we can go from the world that we know right now right to “the end of the world as we know it” (TEOTWAWKI) land. It’s how we get from “just another Sunday” to “Mad Max” overnight.
Electromagnetic pulses and you
The thrust of this article isn’t really about EMP’s, but rather it’s about how the fear of an EMP motivates me… and how fear of an event like an EMP can be used for good in your life and your prepping.
Still, we had better touch on what an EMP is and what it would do to society as we know it.
An EMP is, basically, a short burst of intense energy that fries electronics and man-made electrical systems.
EMP’s can be man made or natural. An example of a man-made EMP is if a nuclear bomb is exploded high above the ground in the upper atmosphere, that blast sends out an EMP that kills electronics. A natural EMP is something such as a massive solar storm.
The fear I have is that an EMP, no matter how it is caused, will wipe out the modern electrical grid and transportation system. Since we now live in a world where most people “don’t live where the food is“, that people will go hungry and thirsty (after the water systems break down) and, frankly, start massive social disruptions that include murder, oppression, pretty much all things Mad Max.
EMP’s sound like a pretty reasonable thing to be afraid of, but…
This whole risk analysis thing you’ve been talking about here at 3BY makes you wonder how likely one of these events are?
The answer is “well, it’s hard to tell, but… one of them happened within the last 200 years”.
Back in 1859, telegraph services were a fairly new thing, but they were in wide enough use to show how dangerous an EMP could be to a society that depends upon electricity. A solar storm, popularly refereed as the Carrington Event, hit the earth and caused massive damage and disruption of the telegraph services.
There was so much energy floating around in the atmosphere, telegraph operators actually unplugged their systems from the batteries that ran them and powered the telegraph lines simply from the ambient electricity.
Those early telegraph systems were crude, and other than wrecking batteries they were not sophisticated enough to really be damaged by that massive discharge of solar energy.
Had something like the Carrington Event storm hit the Earth before 1859? Nobody knows. Why? Because there was nothing electronic to be affected by any previous solar storms.
What we do know is that it did happen once, though… and that there’s no reason to believe it was a one-off event.
Using our own fears as a tool
There is nothing productive about “sitting around being afraid of something.”
Sure, I’m afraid of what would happen to society if we get hit by an EMP. But that fear only does me harm unless I choose to USE the fear to motivate me to start to limit the damage to my and my loved one’s lives that an EMP would cause.
When I really stopped and thought about my EMP fear, I said to myself “self, if you see a disruption of the food supply coming from an EMP, then you had better both stockpile some food and start to grow your own. Self, if you think that society may break down into lawlessness then you had better start figuring out how to protect yourself and your family. Self, if you think that resources such as medical help may become scarce, then you had better start collecting up medical supplies and (more importantly) learning how to use them.”
All of these things and more I started to do because I recognized and confronted my fear of an EMP.
EMP fear as a prepping tool
One of the really, really good side-effects of prepping for an EMP is that the scale of the disaster that an EMP would cause is so wide spread, it leads me into prepping pretty much across the board.
The preps that I do to reduce the effects of an EMP are almost universally useful if other Stuff Hits The Fan (SHTF) situations arise.
Food stored for an EMP emergency can be eaten if there’s a weather emergency, social chaos, if we are isolated because of a pandemic, if there’s a catastrophic income loss by the family, etc.
Guns that we have for self protection from EMP induced social chaos are again useful for all of the above mentioned SHTF situations as well.
EMP prepping isn’t the end-all though
Sometimes we are reminded that we need other, specific, preps that have NOTHING to do with preparing for an EMP.
Both Paranoid Prepper and I realized this following the latest Ebola scare and we talk about that here and here (CLICKY).
EMP’s are pretty widespread, but other prepping situations also need to stay on the radar including pandemic, earthquake, tornado, etc.
Reasonable fears vs unreasonable fears
I’ve talked about it before, but I’ll mention again that I have an entirely unreasonable fear of being swept away in the middle of the night by a catastrophic dam failure flood.
We’ve all heard of people being killed when a dam gives way, Salty, so why is this such an unreasonable fear?
Well… because I don’t live below a dam. I live on high ground. Even though there’s a pretty good sized dam only about 3 miles from me, I live above the water level of the lake… and, whatever else weird we have going on in the ole USA right now, the fact that water still flows downhill hasn’t changed.
Many people would say most things we preppers fear are unreasonable. These are the people who don’t have 3 days worth of supplies in their pantry, who don’t have any spare gasoline stored, who don’t have a secondary way of heating their houses in the winter and who are what we preppers know as “sheeple”.
Because of my EMP fear, we have WAY, WAY, WAY more than three days worth of food, we have spare gasoline, we have a secondary way of heating our house that requires no electricity, etc.
They may think my EMP fear is unreasonable, but here’s what I know: If the huge ice storm hits, if the flu gets so bad that everything public is shut down, if social unrest occurs, I’m set…
It doesn’t matter what causes the disruptions, and at the point where they happen it doesn’t matter what caused me to start prepping, either.
It just matters that we are sitting there set and ready, no matter what.
Possibilities of emp are very low, cme could be any time but still
low risk as it’s rare.
Yes rare, one bad occurrence in recorded history, several small time events in known history.
Any state actors doing this know they will poison the entire world and possibly cause human extinction through rad poisoning- through
multiple power plant meltdowns.
Lone terrorists would be unable to cause wide spread damage so no big issue there.
I feel this is a false fear option, not a reality.
If that’s what you need for motivation you have problems.
I use EMP and CME rather interchangably since they have similar effects. The Carrington Event was a CME.
We have no idea how rare they are because we haven’t had any way to monitor them before the middle 1800’s. They may happen every couple hundred year, or they may happen every 500,000 years.
Are these low probability events? Well, EMP is, yes. CME? Nobody really knows how low or high the probability is. I’ve heard lots of opinions and guesses, but the evidence that supports those opinions is not in any way compelling or convincing.
I don’t sit around worrying about EMP’s but I did first get started thinking about prepping because of them, and I use them as a benchmark because prepping for an EMP is also prepping for most other SHTF scenarios.
As for my own part, I don’t worry about EMPs. Or nuclear war, or comet impacts, or Supervolcanoes. Low probability events are not something I stress over. I do prepare for them though. Why? As Salty says; most preps are multipurpose. The issue is *cumulative* risk. Do I think any one of the things above will happen in my lifetime? No. Do I think *something* that seriously disturbs normal life has a decent probability of happening in my lifetime? Yes. I look back at history and see it happened to a whole lot of people (although what the ‘it’ was varied greatly). I prep because periodic disasters have been a frequent part of human existence and I don’t imagine we’re immune; and I prep because disasters that come one family or small region at a time are very common and already have affected me … and the preps help.
1. While CME hitting the earth is rare, CME is not all that rare. I remember reading about a Carrington sized CME that crossed our orbit but we weren’t in the path; happened within the last 10 years. I think we missed it by a few days of orbit.
2. Like you, I prep for CME/EMP. I started after reading ‘One Second After’, and figured that if I was prepped for living in the 1890’s, I was prepped for New Madrid quake, ice storm or other major natural disaster. After Obama was elected and we learned his vision for the country, I upped my skills and added to the food preps.
3. You might be interested in reading ‘The Gift of Fear’. Good book on how we can use fear as a positive thing in our lives, not a negative.
Ray
Good article Salty,
EMP is a good level to start and finish at. Covers all problems that could happen. Matters not, what happens as long as you are coved with your preps.
In my humble opinion, those who dismiss CMEs and nuclear generated EMPs as any sort of serious threat really shouldn’t claim to be preppers/survivalists. While those on the Atlantic coast are experiencing Hurricane Florence currently, I live in an area that is hurricane-proof. I can dismiss that threat. No one lives in an area that is CME proof, however, and few Americans live in areas that are EMP proof.
Anyone who dismisses the vulnerability of our modern industrialized society to a CME is simply ignorant. Not only does the Carrington Event serve as a warning, look at this warning from NASA: https://science.nasa.gov/science-news/science-at-nasa/2014/02may_superstorm/
Every prepper has the right to his/her own opinion. That doesn’t mean that he or she is correct. Life is about choices. Choices have consequences.
Is Earth getting hit by a CME rare? Sure. But so is flooding in many places. Would you buy a home in a 100-year flood plain without getting flood insurance? I certainly wouldn’t even though such a flood would be “rare.”
Your mileage may differ. Again, life’s about choices.
I always try to remind folks who scoff at low probability events that folks win the lottery all the time, and that a one in a million event happens almost daily in the USA (328.6 million folks in US over 365 days, means every 26.65 hours for that one in a million shot.) Ok, I’ll admit I’m a math geek. 😛
I also point out that while certain events are low probability, they would have a high impact…so they are definitely worth being prepared for.
Just remember that for an incoming CME event you’ll have at least a few hours and probably a few days of warning (giving you time to top off supplies and take various mitigation steps.) Hopefully utility operators will take mitigation steps too, but you can unplug critical electronics, retract antennas, disconnect from the cable TV system – basically disconnect everything from any long wire runs to minimize damage to your gear. The grid will come back at some point and it would be nice to not have to replace everything….
Of course with nuclear EMP there is no warning (or very minimal warning if we get launch detection warnings), so having replacement/emergency gear always stored in faraday cages is important unless you don’t mind immediately dropping back to 1800’s tech.
Of course as multiple people here have noticed, the gear needed for life post EMP are also useful for most other SHTF events, so it’s not wasteful to have gear sealed up in a metal trash can until needed and the same food is as good for loss of job as it is for loss of electronics.
Pearl Harbor, The Tet Offensive, and 911 were extremely remote possibilities: Until they happened. Bottom line, if a person is prepared for an EMP then they are just about prepped for anything.