32 Replies to “Lights Out”

  1. One worker.
    One transmission relay.
    One wrong setting.
    Result – Great Northeast Blackout of 1965.
    Imagine what could have happened if harm had been intentional.
    Heck, imagine what would happen if we had the same blackout in today’s world versus the world of 1965.
    Sleep well…

  2. There will be Weeping, Wailing, and Gnashing of Teeth.
    And BTW be careful walking around any building over 4 stories high.
    Could get knocked in the head with an iPhone 3-6,
    or,
    300 lb man/woman moving about 89-150 kilometers per hour.

  3. What’s really unnerving is seeing more “disenfranchised youth” starting to prep including hanging out in gun stores.

  5. Hush that kind of talk Bill.
    We’re too busy spending billions of dollars attempting to establish rules that will fix and control the weather.

  6. Given the state of urban-centric society today, I’m thinking there’s no down side to an EMP event – a natural cull of the “entitled”. Most of these types would perish in a environment without a handy Starbucks, or 7-11.
    If you don’t have the means to survive at least a year off the grid you are living life like a Pollyanna and a future statistic.
    Shocker for our socialist collectivist state friends – those who did prepare for the SHTF event are not going to share – it will be hard to find guilt-ridden self-destructive alturists to give up their food, heat/shelter/water in a shortage crisis, the old entitlement con doesn’t work here – and if you attempt to take what they have you better come up with a better defense plan than those who guard the scarce private resources you feel “entitled” to. The ant and the grasshopper made starkly real for the legions of urban grasshoppers.
    An EMP or similar natural event will be the real zombie apocalypse and a cathartic moment for any entitled collectivists who survive it. Those who hide in the security of the nanny state’s skirts should realize the “skirt” awfully fragile and will blow away in a strong wind – leaving nanny’s little foundlings to the forces of reality.

  7. Yeah well, this prospect is ald news….so old that maybe the few remaining DC3’s will keep flying, 707’s and DC 8’s maybe not but most modern commercial airliners have been hardened for a generation.
    It’s not that expensive for new construction/production….it’s retrofitting that is costly.
    Our cars will probably be OK…a metal car body is one helluva Faraday Cage. Big rigs…feature composite hoods…..opps….

  8. The left isn’t interested in protecting against this threat because, like ISIS, it’s real.

  9. I am working with a group of people who are 20 to 30 years younger than I. When I tell them that the best things which have happened since 1900 are: modern sanitation; clean drinking water; electricity and modern dentistry, they look at me as if I have 2 heads. And of those 4 which I itemized, cheap electricity (energy) is #1. Without cheap energy, we would not have the other 3 or the Internet, TV, the ability to heat our houses, modern food delivery systems – the list goes on. Bill Whittle is right, the enemies of the western world could take us out in a keystroke, without hurting themselves.

  10. They’ll keep flying until they run out of fuel. In such an event a pilot’s first priority will be a place to land before he runs out of fuel, and he won’t be too keen to take off again. Air traffic control, ground to air communications, navigational beacons, runway lights, aircraft refuelling, maintenance (power tools, technical data and parts inventory stored on computers), all will be affected by the loss of grid power. How much of everything we rely on is hardened or backed up by redundant systems with local generators with on-site fuel storage?

  11. The “preppers” and lone wolf survivalists will be dead meat too.
    The zombie apocalypse is not the enemy to fear in the post-civilization future. The Neo-Viking raiders will be the problem. Well organized and armed, with lots of experience finding and taking food, ammo and let us say “entertainment”. The more you have, the more tempting the target and the more determined they will be to get it.

  12. I used to have a Cat D3 gen-set skid unit.
    No transisters or solid state….XRCAF doncha know….BASICALLY WW2 tech
    Pup start with a pill rope.
    110/220 AC and 3phase AC
    That would power a lotta fuel pumps….if they hadn’t been fried by the EMP…
    Realistically these sorta things are just stop gaps to allow adaptation to the inevitable…no electricity, petroleum fuels etc.
    Bill is correct….North America would go back 150 years swiftly….know lowta run a steam engine…or hitch a horse up. The Amish would be the new go to guys….tho their gen-sets wouldn’t work either.

  13. “The Neo-Viking raiders will be the problem.”
    Precisely mine own sentiment…..
    The solution to that is don’t try to beat ’em….join ’em.
    The meek don’t inherit nothin’……..

  14. Pray it happens in the spring if you live in Canada or anything North of the Carolinas…if it happened this time of year towards winter…(Gas and oil furnaces don’t work without A/C power)…Cities would freeze to death in no time. Emergency stations for warmt like large stadiums would be overwhelmed. Fires would spread out of control as citiots would try to keep warm in their homes. The only up side would be that any foods that can be kept frozen would be safe…As long as you can cook it.
    If it happened in the spring/early summer at least we would have a few months to prepare for the next killer winter. Canada is a killer 7 ~ 9 months a year without shelter and heat.

  15. “a metal car body is one helluva Faraday Cage”
    you ever hear the word antenna
    cars AND farm tractors are likely victims of an EMP event

  16. My normally astute wife compared this scenario with the bombing of cities in WW2 and how they hunkered down, although many died through direct injuries, most survived. I pointed out that people were far more self sufficient in those days. They were not as reliant on electricity and did not have “just in time” food delivery systems that eliminated warehouse storage. They did not have a entitlement mentality in those days and had faith in their government to provide minimum resources for their survival. Most important, they knew there was a light at the end of the tunnel if they managed to defeat the enemy. None of that would apply today in any city. The looting would be out of control by the second day and food shelves in all stores would be bare by the third. And then it would get ugly as evrything we take for granted today is based on electricity and computers. No money, no ATM’s or banks, no gas pumps, no wood stoves for heat, no information except the rumor mill and not even a idea what caused all this. My wife agrees and I know I’m preaching to the choir on SDA so I’ll just throw in the same tidbit as always when this subject comes up. Buy a couple of 50 lb bags of dry dogfood and store them in the closet. Long shelf life and hope you never need it. Could buy you a lot of time and is cheap insurance when all other insurance is null and void.

  17. sounds to me like a redo of PET’s NEP only driven by the looney lefts and organizations like the Tide foundation and George Soros.

  18. I’ll just file that under ‘Scary Shit” along with all the other stuff, like global warming, ISIS, earthquakes, speeding tickets, aggressive pan-handlers, my cat …. slipping in the shower … etc.

  19. Yup, that there is some pretty scary stuff, but I have somedumb even scarier and it’s true! You ready for it? Wez all gonna die one day and the all the lights that go with living will be out too. Beat that if you can.

  20. Certainly right. If we worried about all the things we have no control over, we would all turn into neurotics and life would be pretty grimm. Just another one of the joys of living in the modern age. It’s out there just like so many other things. There’s not a generation in history that didn’t have their doomsday scenario.

  21. Any prepper strategy must involve firearms. Since 95% of the country finds this beneath them, would there be a Canada when the lights came back on? My money’s on a solar storm just like what missed us a couple years ago.

  22. On a more positive note, a good societal beating like this would do the world a lot of good. It would force the re-focusing of the intellect towards reality and away from the full frontal liberal retardation that is drummed into peoples mind through watching and obeying the idiot box.
    Just imagine a world without the Libtards and all their cancerous beliefs. i\
    It’s easy if you try.

  23. Sounds like the sustainable world that the left envirowackos always say is the best world possible.

  24. The rest of the world better hope that it is a solar storm that does this, then we all will be in the same boat (metaphorically speaking). If there is a human causative agent, That is a declaration of war, even is it is from ching’s, antonov’s or muhammod’s mama’s basement (or any other basement for that matter. We will know. We will still have 2150 immediately deliverable nukes (as an example, China has about 240. When we run out of immediately deployable nukes, we have another 2500 reserve nukes that just need a final checkout and a whole bunch of nukes for refurbishment or dismantling. Unless obama is president, the rest of the world may no longer exist, except for our tried and true friends and allies. We will know.
    Deployable reserve total
    US 2150 2500 7650
    Rus 1720 2700 8420
    UK 160 65 225
    Fr 290 10 300
    CH ? ? 240
    IS 80? ? 80?
    I, P 200T? 200T?
    NK 0 0 10?
    All data from published sources
    Our Military, (US, UK, CAN, AUS) particularly the Air Forces, have been hardened for a long time. Ya know, no sane pilot expects to deliver his payload and have his engines shut down at the same time. EMPs are funny phenom. Even the “experts’ apparently didn’t know a heck of a lot about them. We stopped testing nukes a long time ago. When we were testing them, we didn’t have much of the sophisticated equipment we have now.

  25. Our cars will probably be OK
    Nope, if your vehicle has a computer it will be fried and you’ll be left with a lawn ornament. Old Toyota and MBenz diesels will just keep chugging along, but the new CD player the owner installed won’t work anymore.
    If you don’t have the means to survive at least a year off the grid you are living life like a Pollyanna and a future statistic. posted by Occam
    quite true. Anyone living in a big city will be screwed, literally and figuratively.
    On a positive note it would probably make lieberals extinct.

  26. Most of my cars will be OK, because most of them have Kettering ignition, which cannot be destroyed by an EMP. The three trucks with computerized engine management systems; it’s a crapshoot. The vehicle’s metal body, and the radiator, too, constitute a partial Faraday cage, which will provide some degree of shielding, depending upon the orientation of the vehicle with respect to the wavefront of the EMP.
    The electronics most at risk will be those that are attached to a grid of any sort, be it the electric grid, telephone wires, or TV cable, even household wiring. because those long spans of wire act as antennas to collect the EMP pulse, and turn it into a voltage surge. Again, orientation matters, but the longer the antenna, the higher the voltage that might be developed.

  27. Guess its time to buy a 6K generator and wire it in. Also – some of that shrink wrapped food that lasts 10 years. Ten years ago I threw out the shrink food I had bought 20 years before that…….. I think I’m getting a little too old to worry about any of this stuff. My kids – in their 40’s – can deal with this – and that is scary every time I think about how they are royally screwing up this planet. Don’t have much of a clue on how to parent either. Sh_t – time for another Scotch…

  28. A good scotch always helps, but if your kids aren’t living in your basement and aren’t in jail, I’d say your parenting skills were adequate.

  29. hilarious,
    I did enjoy the comment about the 50 lb bags of dog food.
    Gives curling up with a good book,
    and your dog, a new meaning.
    Cheers!

  30. “The Neo-Viking raiders will be the problem. Well organized and armed, with lots of experience finding and taking food, ammo and let us say “entertainment”. ”
    Yeah I read the Eden fiction series too – Like I said they better have a offensive plan than organized survivors defense. No wise prepper thinks they will survive by going it alone – you need numbers and skill sets, but foremost a plan to get by. You have to re-establish self sufficient colonies – but first you need to out last the hordes of armed raiders (about 6-8 months) – cache supplies and feed on them while scouting and moving around (no fixed base of operations) know where the bad guys are until their numbers decline from starvation and fighting then you organize and finish them off. If you can keep and access your resources you can outlast them. The greatest part of these resources is a network of able skilled survivors which will work as a guerrilla unit when TSHTF.
    If you want to worry about probable “neo Viking” forces in a post crisis event, worry about America’s enemies using the downed defense systems to “colonise” north America.

  31. “……America’s enemies…..” will only be a problem if they were the source of the EMP.
    In the scenario of a Carington event or nearby Super-Nova…they will be looking for matches too.
    Last I looked at Betelgeuse…..(Distance to Earth: 642.5 light years)…and mused that for all we know it could gone pop a long time ago….and trouble is already incoming…
    What we now observe is Betelguese about 1371 AD….
    What is scary is our magnetic field is weakening….the Carington Event was moderated by a much stronger magnetic field….
    Then there is the prospect of a magnetic reversal….google that….

  32. Occam >
    “No wise prepper thinks they will survive by going it alone – you need numbers and skill sets, but foremost a plan to get by”
    Quite true, the problem for “preppers” is that they are generally independent personalities that don’t follow very well.
    I concur with other commenter’s; the best outcome of a societal collapse is that the Liberals go bye-bye. The bad is that the power vacuum eventually gets filled by someone ruthless either foreign or domestic.
    All I can say is take names and mental notes of who the white Liberals in your community are. You may need that information later.

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