The Mother of All EMP Armageddons

First to go - immediately for some people - is drinkable water. Anyone living in a high-rise apartment, where water has to be pumped to reach them, would be cut off straight away. For the rest, drinking water will still come through the taps for maybe half a day. With no electricity to pump water from reservoirs, there is no more after that.

....supermarket shelves would empty very quickly - delivery trucks could only keep running until their tanks ran out of fuel, and there is no electricity to pump any more from the underground tanks at filling stations.

Back-up generators would run at pivotal sites - but only until their fuel ran out. For hospitals, that would mean about 72 hours of running a bare-bones, essential care only, service. After that, no more modern healthcare. _NewScientist

It has happened before, and it will happen again. A severe solar storm strong enough to destroy huge areas of electric power across a continent such as North America. In 1859, the Carrington Event provided eight days of severe solar storms. Should anything like that happen these days, large parts of the Earth might be without power for several months or longer.

According to the NAS report, a severe space weather event in the US could induce ground currents that would knock out 300 key transformers within about 90 seconds, cutting off the power for more than 130 million people (see map). From that moment, the clock is ticking for America.

...The truly shocking finding is that this whole situation would not improve for months, maybe years: melted transformer hubs cannot be repaired, only replaced. "From the surveys I've done, you might have a few spare transformers around, but installing a new one takes a well-trained crew a week or more," says Kappenman. "A major electrical utility might have one suitably trained crew, maybe two."

Within a month, then, the handful of spare transformers would be used up. The rest will have to be built to order, something that can take up to 12 months.

Even when some systems are capable of receiving power again, there is no guarantee there will be any to deliver. Almost all natural gas and fuel pipelines require electricity to operate. Coal-fired power stations usually keep reserves to last 30 days, but with no transport systems running to bring more fuel, there will be no electricity in the second month.
30 days of coal left

Nuclear power stations wouldn't fare much better. They are programmed to shut down in the event of serious grid problems and are not allowed to restart until the power grid is up and running.

With no power for heating, cooling or refrigeration systems, people could begin to die within days. There is immediate danger for those who rely on medication. Lose power to New Jersey, for instance, and you have lost a major centre of production of pharmaceuticals for the entire US. Perishable medications such as insulin will soon be in short supply. "In the US alone there are a million people with diabetes," Kappenman says. "Shut down production, distribution and storage and you put all those lives at risk in very short order."

Help is not coming any time soon, either. If it is dark from the eastern seaboard to Chicago, some affected areas are hundreds, maybe thousands of miles away from anyone who might help. And those willing to help are likely to be ill-equipped to deal with the sheer scale of the disaster. "If a Carrington event happened now, it would be like a hurricane Katrina, but 10 times worse," says Paul Kintner, a plasma physicist at Cornell University in Ithaca, New York.

In reality, it would be much worse than that. Hurricane Katrina's societal and economic impact has been measured at $81 billion to $125 billion. According to the NAS report, the impact of what it terms a "severe geomagnetic storm scenario" could be as high as $2 trillion. And that's just the first year after the storm. The NAS puts the recovery time at four to 10 years. It is questionable whether the US would ever bounce back. _NewScientist

It is partly our dependency on technology that makes us vulnerable to natural disasters such as severe space weather, a supervolcano, or a large space rock crashing half a world away. Anything that would interfere with electrical power, transportation, or electronic communication, has the potential to lead to millions of deaths inside even the most advanced countries.

A mere 15 minutes of warning would be too short a time to do anything to prevent cascading power failures and power infrastructure burnout from a severe geomagnetic storm.

The good thing about an electromagnetic apocalypse -- as opposed to a space rock or supervolcano apocalypse -- is that geomagnetic storms will not significantly change the weather to prevent the growth of food crops. Those who can plant, cultivate, and harvest their crops should survive for the most part. After a supervolcano or space rock collision, the Earth might go several seasons before the climate returns to normal, for purposes of agriculture.

Being able to live "off the grid" would provide a distinct advantage, should Earth suffer an extended string of severe solar storm exposure. After such a run of violent space weather, PV panels would be worth their weight in gold.

Hope for the best, prepare for the worst.