Parts supply for an EMP event?
Posted: Thu Nov 06, 2014 3:08 am
The intelligence community has been warning the past 5 administrations that there's a very real chance a rogue nation or organization might detonate a nuke several hundred miles above the US in an EMP attack. No one would be affected by the blast, but our electronics would be destroyed.
The scientific community has been warning the last few administrations of the very real possibility that another massive solar flare event could knock out our grid and electronics. The last such solar storm to hit the earth was in 1859. Fortunately, very little power assets existed. But it knocked out telegraphs and the poles caught fire due to the huge power surge over thousands of miles of cable. No IC's or CB's existed back then. So the event had very little effect on the economy or people's daily lives. No longer. We are completely reliant on our electronics for survival.
Our government has done very little (if anything) to harden our infrastructure against either event. Supposedly only 15% of our military assets are EMP hardened.
If such an event were to take out our infrastructure, estimates suggest up to 90% of the US population would die off within the first 3 months. Since there would be no power and nothing electronic would work (including most vehicles made after the 70's), the aftermath would be devastating. There would be no power and no gas or food distribution - much less production. The economy would collapse. It would take several months to several years to replace the massive transformers that were fried in the event. They used to be made in the US and Western Europe. Now they are all made in China. By then the damage will have been done.
Now that I have all the happy news out of the way, there's a way to "harden" your own electronics from the event. Using a Faraday cage that's grounded with a 4 foot copper ground rod, the insulated contents of the cage should be unaffected.
It could be as simple as a galvanized garbage can with a copper cable bolted to the can and ground rod. Put your electronics in a cardboard box and enclose it in the garbage can. Tape the lid to the can with aluminum tape found at the hardware store.
This is where our scooters come into the equation.
If you have a few 5 gallon gas containers treated with Sea Foam or Sta-Bil, your scooter could get you several hundred to several thousand miles away if you bug-out. Or it could give you a way to get around locally if you bug-in for months or years.
So the question is, which extra components should be purchased and stored in the Faraday cage? After the event, you could swap out the damaged components and have cheap, reliable, and fuel efficient transportation when everyone else basically has none.
Any component with an integrated circuit will be on the list. Which components are those? Anything with fine wire connections or a circuit board should be on the list. Which components are those?
Regulator? Coil? CDI? Stator? Starter? Anything else?
The scientific community has been warning the last few administrations of the very real possibility that another massive solar flare event could knock out our grid and electronics. The last such solar storm to hit the earth was in 1859. Fortunately, very little power assets existed. But it knocked out telegraphs and the poles caught fire due to the huge power surge over thousands of miles of cable. No IC's or CB's existed back then. So the event had very little effect on the economy or people's daily lives. No longer. We are completely reliant on our electronics for survival.
Our government has done very little (if anything) to harden our infrastructure against either event. Supposedly only 15% of our military assets are EMP hardened.
If such an event were to take out our infrastructure, estimates suggest up to 90% of the US population would die off within the first 3 months. Since there would be no power and nothing electronic would work (including most vehicles made after the 70's), the aftermath would be devastating. There would be no power and no gas or food distribution - much less production. The economy would collapse. It would take several months to several years to replace the massive transformers that were fried in the event. They used to be made in the US and Western Europe. Now they are all made in China. By then the damage will have been done.
Now that I have all the happy news out of the way, there's a way to "harden" your own electronics from the event. Using a Faraday cage that's grounded with a 4 foot copper ground rod, the insulated contents of the cage should be unaffected.
It could be as simple as a galvanized garbage can with a copper cable bolted to the can and ground rod. Put your electronics in a cardboard box and enclose it in the garbage can. Tape the lid to the can with aluminum tape found at the hardware store.
This is where our scooters come into the equation.
If you have a few 5 gallon gas containers treated with Sea Foam or Sta-Bil, your scooter could get you several hundred to several thousand miles away if you bug-out. Or it could give you a way to get around locally if you bug-in for months or years.
So the question is, which extra components should be purchased and stored in the Faraday cage? After the event, you could swap out the damaged components and have cheap, reliable, and fuel efficient transportation when everyone else basically has none.
Any component with an integrated circuit will be on the list. Which components are those? Anything with fine wire connections or a circuit board should be on the list. Which components are those?
Regulator? Coil? CDI? Stator? Starter? Anything else?
