A single nuclear weapon detonated a few hundred miles above the US could blanket the entire nation with an electromagnetic pulse that would disable most electronics. What would happen after an EMP attack?
Unless you are in a jet liner, plummeting to earth, or caught in a massive traffic jam of stalled vehicles on the interstate, you might not even know anything has changed. Sure the power is off, but we’ve all been through that dozens of times. You call the power company. But the phone doesn’t work and that might be slightly more unnerving. You might go to your car to drive around and see what happened and then it becomes more unnerving when the car does not even turn over, nor any other car in your neighborhood.
Twelve hours later the food in your freezer starts to thaw, if it is winter and you don’t have a wood stove the frost will start to penetrate in to your house, if summer and you live in Florida your house will be an oven. And that will just be the start.
Law enforcement will be powerless without radios, cell phones, and squad cars, unable to know where there is a crisis and how to react. The real horror show within hours will be in hospitals and nursing homes. They’re required by law to have back up generators, but those generators are “hot wired” into the building so power can instantly kick in if the main system shuts down. That “hot wiring” means the Electro Magnetic Pulse will take out the generators and their circuitry as well.
If you are familiar with what happened in New Orleans after Katrina, multiply that ten thousand times over to every hospital and nursing home in America. Nearly everyone dependent on life support equipment in ICUs will be dead within hours. Nearly everyone in nursing homes dependent on oxygen generators, respirators, etc., will be dead or dying while depending on the time of year temperatures within plummet or soar.
As to medical supplies, not just in hospitals but across the nation to every local pharmacy, they are all dependent on something called Fed Ex. As we have perfected a remarkable system of instant delivery, guided by computers, local inventories have dropped to be more cost efficient and even for reasons of security with controlled substances, which to ordinary citizens means pain killers. Supplies will run out in a matter of days. Those of us dependent on medications to control asthma, heart disease, diabetes, and a host of other aliments which a hundred years ago would have killed us shortly after the onset. . .will now face death within days or weeks, unless the national power grid comes back on line quickly and order is restored.
How long would it take to bounce back though?
Well, you see, we might not bounce back:
Any of us who have lived through a major disaster such as a hurricane, ice storm, or tornado, and then gone several days without power know the sequence, h ow much longer the wait seems to be, and then finally the welcome sight of a power company repair truck turning on to your block. . .and that truck might be from a power company five hundred miles away. All our disasters have ultimately been local in nature, Andrew in Florida, Katrina in Louisiana and Mississippi or one this author went through with Ivan in North Carolina. The disaster is local, even if fifty thousand square miles are affected, help streaming in from neighboring states, caravans of power trucks, each carrying not just experienced crews, but ladened down with all the replacement parts necessary to put electricity and phone service back into your house. When Ivan hit my town, dumping 30 inches of rain, wiping out the power grid and water supply, in less than twelve hours thousands of gallons of bottled water had arrived from Charlotte, power companies from Alabama, Tennessee and Virginia were arriving, the special parts needed to replace my town’s shattered water main from the reservoir were air lifted in by a national guard unit.
Consider though if the entire nation is “down.” Quite simply there are not enough replacement parts in the entire nation to even remotely begin the retro-fitting and replacement of all components. Every community will be on its own, struggling to rebuild … on their own.