EMPs, 2012, and Lions and Tigers and Bears, Oh My!

I was reading a blog called Food Storage Made Easy and they had a little something about a book called One Second After. I got curious and read the summary of the book on Wikipedia (the wiki article was enough, reading the actual book would be WAY too scary for me!)

The book basically describes what life would be like should an electo-magnetic pulse happen and everything electrical is wiped out. We're talking power, anything with a computer chip including vehicles, water and sewage facilities (think pumps and such), the list goes on and on, and how we as humans no longer have the knowledge of living/surviving independently of our community infrastructure. We don't have the same skills that people born 100 years ago did, like preserving foods, raising crops, making our own supplies, aquiring fresh water, etc.

Well, with all that rattling around in my brain, I searched for info on an EMP attack (or natural occurance through a solarstorm), which led to a blog called blog.2012pro.com, which led to this interesting bit about "magic":

The science fiction writer Arthur C. Clarke once said: Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.

This statement is commonly known as Clarke’s Third Law. Many people have heard this quotation, but few people really think about its implications.

We now live in a world that is so completely immersed in advanced technology that we depend upon it for our very survival. Most of the actions that we depend upon for our everyday activities — from flipping a switch to make the lights come on to obtaining all of our food supplies at a nearby supermarket — are things that any individual from a century ago would consider magic.

Very few people in industrialized countries do work that is not directly assisted by electronic computers, although that computerized assistance is often quite invisible to the average person. Few people think about things such as the fact that whenever we buy some food item at a supermarket (and many others are buying the same item), the next time we go to that same supermarket, they still have about the same supplies that they had before. There are invisible infrastructures all around us that are made up of advanced technology. Most of us just take the magic for granted.

Few people stop to consider what would happen if, in an instant, the magic went away. If our advanced technology were suddenly and completely destroyed, how would we manage to survive? A nuclear EMP could make the magic go away. I hope it never happens, and I don’t think that it is at all inevitable. It makes no sense, however, to be blind to the danger. It is both much less likely to happen — and also less likely to have a catastrophic impact — if, both as a civilization and as individuals, we are prepared for an attack on our advanced technology. A nuclear EMP would be a seemingly magical attack upon our advanced technology, the technological infrastructure upon which our lives depend.

click here to read the rest of this article

(I also found good stuff on Modern Survival Blog)

Other research revealed how vulnerable our country's power grid is and that something of this sort could actually happen. Hmmm. (And I really don't buy into the whole "2012" thing, but there is good info on the blog regardless.)

I've been trying to sock away canned goods, but I feel I need to expand my thinking: Long term food storage, water storage, communication devices (and protecting them from EMP so they would actually work afterward (just found out about Faraday cages), ammunition (yep, ya gotta go there) and many other things.

Being Mormon, food storage is no foreign subject and I'm thankful that my church implores us to have food stored away to provide for our families, and gives us resources and information to do so.

Then I also have to think of my older kids who don't live close by. (Guess what kids? Your mama is probably going to show up with some weird things and tell you to store them. Appease her, ok?) And even if an EMP weren't to happen there are always natural disasters, and other kinds of attacks that would more temporarily make life difficult.

So, what do you think? Am I paranoid? A bit crazy? Or are you with me on this? Do you have a plan?