OK, let’s start with the lights went out and there was a major storm going through the area, so the power will probably be on in a few hours to a few days when the utility company gets the power lines back up and the transformers fixed. First check to see if the natural gas (if you have natural gas normally of course) is still up and running. For most people this means the stove and water heater. If they are still working, you can still cook food, have hot water and things won’t be too bad, just an unexpected camp out in the house. Next check the faucets to make sure the water is still working too. Always put something under the tap to catch any water in case just a bit comes out and then stops, which can mean a major disruption.
To begin, let’s say the electricity is off, but the gas and water are still working, and it is just a minor blip, which is what happens in the vast majority of cases. Now what? Well of course you have flashlights and batteries, so going into the basement won’t be a problem. Keeping the freezer and refrigerator closed will help keep things cold, and the lights come on in a few hours or a day or so, not a major problem except for the most unprepared. But what if the electric power goes off for a few weeks as it did when a tornado came through my area? What then?
First, talk to your neighbors if you haven’t already. Are all of you in the same fix? Is the power out all over or only in a limited area, as it was with me? Next ask if anyone has a portable generator that you can plug your freezer into. A friend of mine had a generator that he took around to all the various house holds and plugged the fridge/freezer in to it for a few dollars for gas. $5.00 for gas twice a week sure beat losing $300 worth of meat! You might also look into buying your own small portable generator as well, they are not all that expensive and come in handy for a lot of things around the house and garage.
Now let’s say the problem is either larger or more long term. Now what? Well the first things you need in any emergency or survival situation is shelter, food, water and possibly heat, depending on when the problem happens. Your home will provide shelter in most cases, unless it is destroyed or you are forced out due to fire, flood or other destruction. If you have to, you can sleep in your car or set up a tent in a camping area or friend’s yard. Just make sure to check your tent out – even if it’s new. A friend bought a tent to go out to an archeological dig, and it collapsed the first night due to faulty poles, many miles from where they bought it.
Food and water are next. If you are planning to stay in-place in an emergency, (usually the best idea), commercially canned goods are excellent. First of all they are generally what you normally eat, so you are not being subjected to foods that you’re unaccustomed to in an already stressful situation. An emergency is not the time to find out you can’t stand the taste of your emergency foods, or they give you diarrhea. Also they have water in the can so you are not using your drinking water for food prep, as you would with dried or dehydrated foods. Next, canned goods are ready to eat, as they are heated to the point where the food is cooked during canning. While the food might not look good, or taste all that great either, properly stored canned foods will last several years and still retain most of the nutrition and vitamins, as some vitamins will break down over time.
As to water, I favor two-liter plastic pop bottles. First they are either free (ask any of your pop drinking friends to save them for you) or low cost and readily available. Also, they are incredibly strong and break resistant, so you can freeze and refreeze them over and over as well as not needing to worry if you drop them.
Two liters of water per person for drinking is a bare minimum, a gallon a day is better and normally what is recommended. More water will be needed if you are going to be in a hot area or exerting yourself. Ask at restaurants if they use bulk wine for cooking, as these come in plastic bags and are also good for water storage. Ask them to keep the heavy duty cardboard boxes they come in too, as the bags are just that - bags - and will flop all over if not contained. Five gallon water cooler jugs/carboys are also useful. I stored five gallons of water in a plastic water cooler jug and had several two liter bottles full of city tap water for over five years and it still tasted the same when I drank it as when I bottled it.
As to heat, this can be problematical. Are you able to have alternate heat sources? A wood stove might not fit in to your apartment (more on this later), or there may be laws controlling what you can and can’t have. Portable kerosene heaters are popular and handy. Kerosene is easy to store and not as flammable as gasoline, although not as easily available. A hibachi or grill can provide heating and a way to cook food as well, but due to the carbon monoxide produced from burning wood/charcoal, care must be taken to make sure the area is well ventilated. If your apartment building has an incinerator, you can, if fortunately placed, tap into the chimney and vent your smoke right out, hopefully with no one being the wiser.
Waste matter may be a problem as well. If the water is still available, or only available as long as the water tower (some apartment buildings have a water tank on the roof) has water in it to provide pressure, then flush toilets are an option. The down-side is they often use a lot of water that could be used for drinking or bathing and once the water pressure is gone, there’s no more water. Chemical toilets, composing toilets, or even a bucket with a plastic bag in it might be needed if you can’t dig an outdoor privy. If you have the room or ability, you might look into a methane generator to convert all your organic waste into methane that you can use to provide heat and light. These are widely used in China and other areas, and plans are readily available on the internet or at the library.
As to storing all your survival supplies, that is easier than you might imagine. Most homes have unused or wasted space areas that can easily be put to use. For example a friend said he had no place to put all the supplies he had stored in his apartment. I walked in and had it hidden in a few minutes. Where? Under and behind the couch, padded chairs, bed, and rearranging the closets. Boxes covered with table cloths became the end tables. Frills around the bottom of the couch and chairs kept anyone from seeing what was under there. Instead of spreading out, try going up with shelves or boxes stacked on top of each other. The possibilities are endless.
Douglas Bell was born and raised in Iowa City, Iowa. He has been a reloader for 40 years and a professional gunsmith for 30. His work has been featured in various publications such as: Gun Week, American Handgunner, Live Free DIRECTIONS, Kurt Saxon’s U.S. Militia, The Independent American, Dark Knight SURVIVOR, NSA Newsletter, Region 5 Report and many others.
Surviving An EMP:
aka: Electro Magnetic Pulse
by Mat Stein
Lately there has been a lot of hype about EMP (electromagnetic pulse)—some of it quite justifiable, and some of it overblown. In this article I will try to sort the facts from the fiction to give you a clearer understanding of the probable effects from a nuclear device generated EMP, as well as its cousin—a solar super storm.
What is generally referred to as an EMP is a detonation of a nuclear device at high altitude, roughly defined as somewhere between 24 and 240 miles above the surface of the earth. Nuclear detonations of these types have the potential to knock out electronic devices and electrical power grids along their line of sight, covering huge distances, on the order of an area 1500 miles in diameter, which would correspond to a circular area stretching roughly from Quebec City in Ontario Canada down to Dallas Texas.
Not every electrical device in this area would be fried, but certainly enough would go down that modern life as we know it would cease to exist for a long period of time over a very large area. Imagine if instantaneously the entire central and northeastern portion of the United States were knocked out by a single nuclear airburst. Without directly killing a single person, or blowing up a single building, in just a few moments the New York Stock Exchange, the governing body of the United States, and the giant machine that keeps over one half the population clothed, fed, employed, and entertained would come to a screeching and catastrophic halt, and
in the ensuing months, many millions of people could die of disease and starvation!
Similar in many respects to EMP are “solar super storms”, which also have the ability to severely affect electronics and electrical power grids. Their effects tend to be significantly less severe on the local level than an EMP from a nuclear airburst. However, since a super solar storm could conceivably cripple the grid across most of the industrial centers of our world, its overall effect might be far worse than a severe EMP.
What to Expect From an EMP
When a nuclear device is detonated above ground, it generates three different categories of electromagnetic effects, and these are referred to as E1, E2, and E3 effects. The E1 is the direct freely propagating electromagnetic field effect that happens immediately, on the order of less than one nanosecond to a few nanoseconds. The E1 effects are particularly damaging to modern integrated circuits in electronic controls, which form critical elements in every aspect of our modern world’s infrastructure. The E1 effects induce high voltage currents in any kind of significant wiring runs that connect various sensing elements in data acquisition and control systems.
The intermediate time EMP effects are categorized as E2 effects. These are similar in frequency to lighting strikes, but their occurrence will be much like many thousands or millions of lightning strikes occurring simultaneously over thousands of square miles. In many cases, the protective circuits designed to protect devices and power distribution systems from lightning damage may well be adequate, but if the rapid E1 effects have damaged the device’s lightning protection, the E2 effects falling immediately on its heels will destroy those devices.
The late time EMP effects are categorized as E3 effects, and may last for a minute or more. E3 pulses are quite similar to the geomagnetic induced currents from solar storms. E3 effects are known to induce huge currents and voltages on long runs of electrical wires and conductors. Geomagnetic storms, such as the one that fried the major HydroQuebec grid transformer, are known to cause major damage to electrical system components at much lower levels than might reasonably be experienced during an E3 EMP event.
The following are some anticipated effects from a nuclear device generated EMP:
Extended grid failure is likely to extend far beyond the region directly affected by the EMP. For example, on August 10, 1996, during a triple digit heat wave, sagging power lines in Oregon shorted against insufficiently trimmed tree limbs, causing a cascading blackout that cut power to 7 western states, parts of Baja Mexico, and parts of two Canadian provinces. The grid had been operating near peak capacity due to massive loads from air conditioning units operating during the heat wave, and the shorted lines threw it over the edge into short term collapse, affecting millions of customers.
Cellular telephone systems are particularly susceptible to EMP and will likely fail immediately due to direct E1 and E3 effects.
Land line telecommunication systems that were not damaged by the initial E1 and E3 effects, will likely fail within 4 to 72 hours as battery backup supplies run down, and generator backup power for central telephone substations run out of fuel reserves.
There will be a brief period, lasting a few hours to a few days, where backup generators that were not damaged by the E1 and E3 effects will still be functional, until they run out of fuel and cease to operate.
Most smaller electrical devices that were not plugged in, or turned on, at the time of the EMP will still be operable, provided they were not connected to long runs of cable such as Ethernet network lines or the local grid.
If the EMP happened during normal waking hours, roughly 10 to 15% of cars and trucks that were on the road at the time of the EMP will stop operating immediately, causing major traffic tie ups. Cars not operating at the time of the EMP will be mostly functional though many will have annoying issues.
Most street lights and traffic signals will be damaged by the E1 and E3 effects, contributing to major traffic problems in metropolitan and suburban areas.
The magnetic data on personal computers, banks, and business systems will probably survive, but microelectronic control circuits in most of the devices that read and write that data (computer hard drives, tape drives, etc), if operating at the time of the EMP, will be damaged or destroyed.
The 1-3 day supply of food in supermarkets will be rapidly depleted due to the destruction of the electronic systems that control today’s highly automated “just in time” delivery systems. Loss of the grid means that food storage refrigerator systems will stop functioning when backup generator fuel runs out in 1-3 days time.
The electronic SCADA “eyes, ears, and voice” systems that would normally diagnose, dispatch and coordinate repairs to the grid and telecommunication systems will be crippled, making it nearly impossible to coordinate repairs to these systems.
The volume of trained manpower capable of manually diagnosing and repairing the complex power grid and telecommunications systems is simply not there, making such a monumental task nearly impossible.
Most older style electromechanical devices, such as relays and mechanical switches, will be unaffected by the EMP.
Older pre-fuel injection vehicles will be less likely to be affected.
Battery powered shortwave “ham radio” communications will probably be down for a few hours due to electromagnetic interference. Unless protected by a “faraday cage” most radios inside the EMP area will probably be damaged by the E1 effects, however some of these systems will probably survive, returning to service after a few hours, until they run out of a source of backup power.
Planning Ahead for EMP or a Solar Super Storm
Planning ahead to survive and thrive after an EMP event or solar super storm, requires longer term strategies, more supplies, and varied self-reliance skills that far exceed those required for surviving most other crises or catastrophes. If you happen to live in a rural area that grows more food than it uses, your chances are much better than if you live in a city. If you are able to produce your own food, or trade and barter goods, skilled services, or manual labor for food and essential items, then you stand a decent chance of surviving this ordeal.
I suggest you start by picking up a copy of The Encyclopedia of Country Living, by Carla Emery, How to Survive the End of the World as We Know It by James Wesley Rawles, When Technology Fails by Matthew Stein, and at least one or two books on wild edible plants native to your area that include clear color photographs of plants at various times of the year. You should also consider stockpiling guns and ammunition for self-defense and hunting purposes.
Protection of Electronic Devices from EMP and Solar Storms
A detailed discussion of the technological strategies for protecting electronic devices from EMP and solar super storms is beyond the scope of this article, but I will give you a few general guidelines. Detailed technical instructions are offered in the Department of the Army Technical Manual TM 5-690, “Grounding and Bonding in Command, Control, Communications, Computer, Intelligence, Surveillance, and Reconnaissance (C4ISR) Facilities”, which may be downloaded for free on the Internet.
Severe solar storms are likely to be devastating to the grid, and subsequently life and society in general, but not harmful to your personal electronics, computers, automobiles, etc., provided you have adequate surge protection on your lines.
EMP simulation tests indicated that most electronic devices that are self-contained and not operating at the time, wired to an antenna, or connected to significant lengths of wires will be unharmed by EMP or solar storms. Complex digital microelectronics, such as personal computers, are quite sensitive to EMP.
Significant lengths of wires, such as network cables, grid connections, telephone lines, and possibly even local wires that connect your renewable energy system components to each other may experience induced currents of high voltage and amperage, that are potentially damaging to solid state circuits and microelectronics.
Wires entering the building should be lightening protected with suitab
le ground path circuits.
You can protect sensitive electronics (anything with integrated circuits, logic boards, and microelectronics) with homemade “faraday cages”. A faraday cage is simply a continuous metal enclosure that surrounds a device. Do not pierce your faraday cage with any power cords or antennas, or those items will bring induced currents into your device, potentially ruining it. Your faraday cage must be insulated from electrical contact with the device it is meant to protect. You can make a simple faraday cage by first insulating your device with a couple layers of plastic garbage bags, or layers of rolled plastic film, then covering it with a continuous layer of aluminum foil. Tape overlapping sections of foil to itself to form a continuous metal shielding layer. A metal garbage can makes an excellent faraday cage.
“Nested” faraday cages work even better. To make a nested faraday cage, start with a single layer aluminum foil faraday cage and add one or two more layers of foil with an insulating layer of plastic between each layer of foil.
Aluminum window screen material is also good for making faraday cages.
A simple small readymade “faraday cage” for protecting sensitive electrical components is any old microwave oven (cut the power cord off to prevent it from acting as an antenna).
Store plenty of batteries, and a battery operated shortwave radio. Storing a shortwave radio inside a nested faraday cage is probably your best form of insurance to stay connected and informed after an EMP event.
Most magnetic media will probably survive an EMP event, but the key word is “probably”. Optical media, such as CDs and DVDs will certainly survive.
For more specific information on tools and techniques for personal protection from EMP, see the online article, “Getting Prepared for an Electromagnetic Pulse Attack or Severe Solar Storm”, by Jerry Emanuelson, available at http://www.futurescience.com/emp/emp-protection.html.
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