- Power systems: Possible widespread voltage control problems and some protective systems will mistakenly trip out key assets from the grid.

- Spacecraft operations: May experience surface charging and tracking problems, corrections may be needed for orientation problems.

- Other systems: Induced pipeline currents affect preventive measures, HF radio propagation sporadic, satellite navigation degraded for hours, low-frequency radio navigation disrupted, and aurora has been seen as low as Alabama and northern California (typically 45° geomagnetic lat.).

https://www.swpc.noaa.gov/

[0] https://www.gridwatch.templar.co.uk/

Above FL410 is rare, except for business jets that can cruise that high. It comes with extra requirements on oxygen masks etc.

Polar routes are not that rare, but depend on certification how far away from a suitable airport you can go.

Although it could also disrupt satellite communication causing some delays in flight planning and aircraft/crew turnaround.

For a fun anecdote, when the HF radio fault was reported we weren't aware of the troubles in the ionosphere. After a few hours of troubleshooting on the system and not finding any problems I flippantly remarked that it must've been a solar flare because the radios perfect. 15 minutes later I was reading the news and saw the headline.

https://xkcd.com/radiation/

As a comparison, a typical flight might only have a dose of 40uSv, so like 25 normal flights. But still many people take many more trips than that.

I'm not an electronics expert, but I'm guessing that the reason we're so vulnerable to such an event today is because our infrastructure was originally built without such an event in mind, and now the upgrade cost is prohibitively expensive. But hypothetically, if a sufficiently-damaging coronal mass ejection occurred, such that we were forced to rebuild Earth's electronics infrastructure and electrical grids from scratch, what design changes would we make the 2nd time around? For example:

-adding built-in shielding to protect against electromagnetic interference

-implementing redundancy in critical systems to maintain functionality

-adding early warning systems so that we can take preventative measures like shutting down vulnerable systems

-building a more decentralized electrical grid with smaller, interconnected systems to limit the extent of disruptions

Would taking these steps be sufficient to protect us from major CMEs, or would it be like throwing pebbles at a giant?

1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carrington_Event

My understanding is that it is fairly easy to protect the electrical grid from solar storms. It requires adding grounding at all of the vulnerable equipment. My impression is that the cables won't be hurt but the transformers can be destroyed. It sounds feasible to do but requires the government to regulate the utilities and provide money.

That would be a lot cheaper than implementing distributed grids. It is much more efficient to put lots of solar panels in sunny areas than enough panels and batteries in each house.

We have early warning system. This notice is from space weather tracking that detects flares and predicts if and when they will hit Earth. I don't know if anyone is thinking about how to decide and shut down the grid temporarily, but it should be something they are thinking about.

I'd guess the goal would be to get things going again as fast as possible so no, I doubt there would be much time & effort put into some of the points you mention, at least in the short term. Decentralization might come not so much by design in an event like that, but out of necessity.

So no, neither of those problems are even remotely fixed. We’ve just done the bare minimum to check the “we’ve reacted to a crisis” box.

The problem is that we won't learn about it early enough for our current level of technology to do anything about it.

We'd need 2 fully-operational Starship launches or 4 SLS launches or 10 Delta IV Heavy launches with 25 years notice to redirect an asteroid like Bennu.

Now obviously 2 is better than 4 is better than 10. But the 25 years notice is a big problem. The momentum change you need to deliver the later it gets is so much larger.

And this is exactly my point. We aren’t investing into inventing the technology to do this. Instead we just say “if we can detect a small asteroid early enough then we might be able to divert it” and then count that problem as solved. Even though Bennu is small, we still can’t see the vast majority of objects in the solar system and the advance notice we are talking about is impracticality long.

If this was a software engineering Jira ticket, it wouldn’t pass PR. And software developers aren’t even the most diligent of professionals compared engineers, doctors and scientists. But there’s no incentive for governments to sink money into a theoretical risk that impacts their “enemies” equally. And man do I hate how nations refer to other nations as “enemies” — but that’s a whole other argument.

Imagine humanity being forced to react to an impending impact, say within a few years, from a newly detected 1km+ asteroid, never mind something like the colossal Chicxulub impactor.

”We can’t do this” is both inaccurate and harmfull. I believe ”We are not currently fixing this” and ”there is a need for stronger political alignment” are the more accurate descriptions of the current malaise.

For example things such as:

-should universities be state subsidised or should there be tuition.

-If state needs to raise more taxes what type of tax should they increase; sales tax or income tax.

- should there be a tobacco tax or should tobacco be made illegal

- should cocaine be legalized

Etc etc mundane things.

This is not unrelated to all other things - these all are political issues. There is no ”lane b” for matters of urgency unless there is an imminent disaster looming. All matters need to churn through the same machine - sales tax incease of 0.1 % as well as specific environmental matters.

The biggest villain here is not humnanity. It’s the hydrocarbon companies and families (Koch!) that have fucked up the political dialogue by first seeding ”skepticism” and then making a matter scientific urgency a political negotiable thing.

The machine is what it is, and it’s capable of doing great things. Some fucktards have just intentionally loosened a few gears and somebody would need to fix the mess.

Now, one must point out that the fossil fuels burned have not just disappeared as smoke in the air. We’ve used them to keep the wheels of civilization spinning and in a way it’s not just folks like Koch that have profited but we all have profited from fossil fuel based world order (see for example ’How the world really works’ by Smil). So, in a way all consumers in the industrial world have been benefitted materially - which also explains why there are so many vested interests not too keen to energetically debunk the ”climate skeptics”. Yeah. Everything I own I own mostly because of cheap industrial goods and food in whose production fossil fuels have played an important part.

So it’s not a simple thing to fix. But it’s all down to the same machine.

As long as these beliefs are allowed to be mainstream we are 100% fucked.

Doesn't this sort of assertion leave no room for the possibility of learning to do so?

Is PFAS rain that much better than acid rain? Rainwater is no longer safe to drink anywhere on Earth.

As for the whales, that's nice they got a reprive... But we're still extinctifying species at 100-1,000x the background rate.

And the people responsible for all of this are not strung up, nor even imprisoned. They're fucking around on mega-yachts and private planes (environmental atrocities in themselves).

Much of the climate change discourse on this site strays into the absurdly hysterical, but some of it veers even further into deep childish fantasy.

I mean if it's strong enough to fry off-grid electronics then it's a different matter entirely, but consumer electronics has some protections against that, right?

Last big storm in 2003 did damage grid level transformers. They also don’t just have those lying around and they’re quite expensive so it’s particularly devastating.

https://www.swpc.noaa.gov/sites/default/files/images/u33/fin...

> but consumer electronics has some protections against that, right?

Much more complicated to answer, but no consumer electronics aren’t safe. Also not much use if the communication systems and electrical grid are down

    104202 Warning 
    Geomagnetic Disturbance Warning 
    05.10.2024 13:48 
    PJM-RTO

    A Geomagnetic Disturbance Warning has been issued for 13:48 on 05.10.2024 
    through 21:00 on 05.10.2024. A GMD warning of K8 or greater is in effect
    for this period.

This is a warning only. No actions are listed yet.

PJM mentions that they turn off guest access if the site overloads. So please don't over-use this link.

' A Geomagnetic Disturbance Action has been issued as of 22:15 on 05.10.2024 to protect the power system from damage or disruptions due to increased geomagnetic activity.'

PJM has a plan. Geo-Magnetic Disturbance (GMD) Operating Plan (EOP-010-1)[1] Usage of some specific transmission lines has to be kept below certain values. Right now, this is a low-load period late at night without bad weather, so there are no additional actions ordered. The system load is probably within the more restrictive limits just because it's late night. If problems develop, you'll see more actions in there. Watch morning load take-up tomorrow.

There's a press release, too.[2]

If you really want to understand this, start at page 32 of this training PowerPoint.[3] In 1989, PJM had a blackout because of this, and that's thoroughly discussed in the training materials. Geography matters. PJM has transmission lines running in the same direction as a mountain range with igneous rock. So "ground" isn't as conductive as is desirable. During a geomagnetic disturbance event, ground voltage at different points can differ. This causes problems with wye-wound transformers grounded at the center of the wye. They get some induced DC current, which can partially saturate the magnetics and heat up transformers.

There's a control room running this in Valley Forge, PA. (And a second control room in an undisclosed location.)

(Incidentally, this has absolutely nothing to do with electromagnetic pulse problems. EMP has a rise time of nanoseconds. GMD has a rise time in minutes. Unless you have a really long wire (many kilometers) with a potential to ground, this doesn't affect much.)

[1] https://pjm.com/directory/manuals/m13/index.html#Sections/38...

[2] https://insidelines.pjm.com/pjm-issues-geomagnetic-disturban...

[3] https://www.pjm.com/-/media/training/nerc-certifications/tra...

It's a good thing this didn't happen in July/August.

(For folks around here, the pjm now app is a nice way to grab current power demand/tie flows/alerts)

K-index is at 8.67 right now, down from 9. (9 is currently the maximum reportable K value.)

Citizen-facing scales should optimally go from 0 (no concern) to 10 (either world-shattering event or highest value ever observed). Due to the nature of how many natural disasters scale in impact on humans, this will often result in an logarithmic scale.

Good scale, I like it.

Interpreting this in the worse light possible… in other words, gate keeping.

I think a lot more people could understand and be mature in a lot more things if artificial and archaic barriers weren’t erected. I think not trusting the public is a recipe for an obscure elite ruling class. Sure, not a whole lot of people will get it but at least be open about it.

Then again, maybe there is a benefit to using that particular scale and I’ve been poisoned by my generational ills.

Not trying to be argumentative.

If I hazarded a guess it’s the second reason right?

That puts us .2 (logarithmically) under the known upper bound for the Carrington event (from above in the thread)

I couldn’t see it either, but didn’t have my glasses with me. My wife and daughter could see the big spot behind these CMEs immediately.

Shame it's going to be always bright outside tonight :(

Other people in the wider area saw similar issues, but mostly were local. Usually power is very stable.

This live map (https://g7vrd.co.uk/wspr/IO81) would usually be full of worldwide contacts being reported by WSPR (Weak Signal Propagation Reporter), but the solar flares have closed down the bands quite considerably.

The map is centred on Maidenhead grid square IO81, but you can change it to wherever you are: https://www.whatsmylocator.co.uk/

This will also cause problems with aircraft, as they use HF when they're out of sight of land.

On the other hand, if a LEO satellite's electronics get fried, sooner or later it will burn up in the atmosphere since it cannot maneuver anymore, and if it carries a load of weapons-grade uranium it's going to be a somewhat unpleasant event, as you imagine.

CMEs tend not to affect small electronics on their own.

Devices at high altitudes and space are subjected to CME events quite often, and usually don't have many side effects other than degraded RF signal propagation.

What effects might you see at ground level in a normal microprocessor device? More bit flips than normal?

I was also expecting my satellite internet to degrade during the last CME that made the news (apologies - can’t remember the date), but it kept chugging along as if nothing had happened.

Storms like this one flood the Earth's magnetosphere with energetic particles, increasing geomagnetic currents that can affect both large-scale and local infrastructure. This might lead to unusual behavior in ground-level electronics, such as increased bit flips, clock shifts, or even unexpected resets in sensitive systems.

As for satellites, their advanced shielding often keeps them running smoothly, which likely explains why your internet service didn't get borked. But during extreme events like now, disruptions to satellite functions and GPS signals will occur, as these systems face direct exposure to the storm's impact. Most likely spare capacity rerouted to supply your link during the impact.

I think it's interesting that secondary particles formed when these high-energy solar particles smash into atmospheric molecules also make their way down to us. These include muons and neutrons—particles that, while generally harmless, can penetrate deep into the atmosphere and occasionally impact ground-level electronics, adding another layer of interaction during severe solar events.

There's also the way that alterations to the flux of EM fields induced locally by the larger currents fluxing in the global electric circuit can cause glitches in microelectronics. And how the fluxing of current in the Earth's magnetosphere causes electron and other charged particle release from the ground. All of these things are amped up now and can contribute.

This whole interaction of solar activity / space weather with our technology is a dynamic area of study—there's always more to learn about how these cosmic and solar stuff affect our ground based or Earth based tech. Hahaha! :)

To induce an appreciable current, the magnetic field has to act on a wave-compatible portion of the conductor. The length and alignment of the wire has to resonate with the direction and length of the wave.

They instead distort the geomagnetic field, and the changing magnetic field induces voltage. But the Earth's magnetic field is pretty weak, so the voltage becomes significant only for very large circuits. Such as transmission lines or old-style telegraph lines.

Also, the global electric circuit is affected by CMEs which affects all electric systems on the planet, to some degree.

While it's true that Earth’s atmosphere and magnetic field shield the surface from most direct particle impacts, the main effect of CMEs come instead from their effect on the electromagnetics of Earth.

For example, these disturbances can induce currents in the Earth itself and even in biological systems, which are sensitive to electromagnetic changes.

This can affect everything from power grids to navigation systems and even animal migration patterns. So, while individual electronic devices might not be directly fried by a CME, they can still be affected by the impact, as well as the broader electrical and biological systems on Earth.

To put it another way: while these particles themselves may not reach the surface, their effects certainly do. The interaction of these particles with the Earth's magnetic field can lead to geomagnetic storms and disturbances that indirectly affect the surface through induced currents, as previously mentioned. These interactions can influence electrical grids and even have subtler effects on biological systems. Thus, the primary impact of CMEs at the surface comes from the electromagnetic fluctuations they cause, rather than from direct contact with the charged particles.

It’s not just about cosmic rays. I wasn’t attacking you, and not saying you don’t understand it, just the comment seemed like a misconception about a few things. Haha! :)

(The intersection of doomerism and tech is amusingly cyberpunk sometimes.)

Actually, what’s the most useful way you’d prepare for a worldwide grid outage? This isn’t that, but sometimes I wonder if a future CME might be as catastrophic as some say.

I guess we could just start building walls of unopened water bottles in our basement…

(In my teens I saw a family friend had a bag full of food supplies. I asked someone if that was a prep bag, and they said yes. I thought they were a bit weird. Now I’ve come full circle browsing Amazon for cheap doomsday food.)

Most of the comments down thread underestimate water consumption. Depending on the climate, you'll want the following daily quantities [1]:

- 2-3 gallons for drinking

- 1.5 gallons for hygiene (can skip for a while)

- 0.5 gallons for food prep

The planning factor for military operations was 8 gallons per person per day. Water is heavy—8 pounds per gallon—and acquiring, storing, and moving it is a large effort.

[1] https://cascom.army.mil/g_staff/g3/TTD/Products/QM-How-to-Ha...

It never occurred to me that people needed this spelled out, but I guess it's simpler in most of the world where 1L = 1kg.

The other kind of people who know about the weight of waters are people with campers / trailers and people with fish tanks in their apartments. The maximum allowable size for a fish tank in the middle of the room is not that much.

> It never occurred to me that people needed this spelled out, but I guess it's simpler in most of the world where 1L = 1kg.

It's easy in gallons and pounds, too, if the correct gallon is used: 10 pounds per imperial gallon of water, by definition.

These are all things which are generally known to Americans. But HN has an international audience, for whom "gallon" is presumably somewhat vague.

The average person needs far less than 65lbs (30kg) of water per day, which is a third of the average male weight in the US.

By medical standards humans need more like 8lbs (under 4l) per day for men and 6lbs (under 3l) for women. Less if your rationing and not exerting yourself.

The way to allow for extras is to store water for a longer length of time. If recommended value is two weeks, and it is in my area, then a month is a good buffer.

I was on a hike that recommended 1 gallon to complete it for 5 miles round trip.

I’m sure there is a method to the madness of 8 gallons per person that isn’t easy to see. There is a lot of rounding up with the military also.

Another cool thing is that you can make (in a pinch, I wouldn’t recommend this over berkey filters) filters from the same type of bulkheads berkey uses attached to home-made ceramic filters. They work remarkably well in emergencies and are trivial to make if you’ve got clay and a hot fire. There’s definitely trial and error involved for getting perfect seals, and some advanced DIYers I’ve seen used glazing to create a more easily sealed rim which can have a plastic tube jammed into it for a friction fit, which then attaches to the inner part of the bulkhead.

Totally unnecessary if civilization is working but awesome if things go sideways and you’re out of filters. There might be better methods too, I haven’t looked into it for years.

OK, no. If you're running a marathon, in hot weather, you're at maybe a liter per hour. Unless you plan to run 20h marathons and the sun never sets, 5 gallon is well beyond drinking needs.

And unless you're able to exert yourself at that level at all, this isn't the "worst case", this is pure fantasy.

And if you're preparing for -20C in your house, I recommend investing in insulation, not more calories stored away. (I also question 3x, the figures I've seen point to 2x, with exertion somewhat counteracting cold)

If the municipal water is still functional but non-potable, a LifeStraw Max gets you effectively unlimited water on-demand for most sources of contamination.

This happened literally last month in the region where I live, and yes "the taps are dry" is exactly what happened.

The water treatment plant staff detected high levels of toluene in the river which feeds the plant, so as a preventive measure, they shut down the whole thing. It took several days until they managed to get the toluene levels in the river low enough that adding activated charcoal to the water intake could get rid of the rest. In the meantime, there was no water being pumped into the system, and once your building's water tank ran dry (the size varies depending on the building), there was no water anymore (unless you hired a water truck to bring water from a nearby city).

And that's not even the first time this kind of thing happened around here. A couple of years ago, another water treatment plant in the same region (fed by a different river) had trouble due to high levels of geosmin in the river, and they also had to shut down for a while. The result was the same, taps running dry once the building water tanks get empty.

Not to mention that pumping water needs lots of electric power. Not only at the water treatment plant, but several other places in the system need to move water against gravity, or increase its pressure.

Consider: "The pumps aren't working and there's nothing left up inside the local water-tower."

Then you'd have to travel to get any appreciable amount of water before even starting to filter it.

Though disaster preparedness and water efficiency are a bit at odds. For the former I'd want to keep all my barrels mostly full, but for the latter I want to keep them empty enough that rainfall events aren't overflowing them and wasting water.

I've taken to trying to have a minimal set of 4 one liter steel water bottles hung in the closet (grab + go) all the time. So convenient to be able to "just grab some water" on the way out the door, and is the start of a solid emergency prep station.

At least in the US, water jugs are generally very flimsy. An attic is likely to have wide temperature variations throughout the year, and leaky water jugs up there could cause some expensive damage.

We do get power failures, so it's mostly been for some garden watering, and being able to flush our toilets during an outage. We're on a well, and the pump needs 220v. I suppose I could get a better generator too, ours only does 120v.

Especially as an autotransformer it's pretty cheap (should be about 50$).

55 gallon rain barrels can often be found subsidized and therefore cheap.

Keep a bunch of camping iodine drops around and you are set.

You already have the equipment for that. Your existing hot water heater stores enough drinking water for a month at least, probably more if you ration carefully.

Flame King Refillable 1LB Empty Propane Cylinder Tank

https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B00MM3GCVO/

It offers some nuanced controls e.g. to avoid overfilling.

1. The propane they are manufactured with is carefully dried, but propane out of bulk tanks is not. The single use tanks have thinner walls with less corrosion protection because the high-end propane doesn't need it.

2. The safety over-pressure valve on those tanks has similar design constraints and may corrode shut with un-dried propane. Sometimes people damage those valves while refilling.

3. It's easy to overfill those little tanks such that high temperatures can cause over-pressure problems. Due to (1) and (2) the built-in safety measures for refillable tanks cannot be assumed.

I was questioning if that risk is meaningful, or if it is like a prop 65 warning on every building you enter, and most products you purchase.

Googling around I was able to find 1 death associated with refilling a DOT-39 container [1], which is scary shit. However, it seems to be caused by a poor coupling, refilling inside, with an ignition source. This could have happened with any container including a certified refillable one.

https://lni.wa.gov/safety-health/safety-research/files/2016/...

If I really need to go light I'm carrying isobutane canisters or using an alcohol stove.

It should be noted for other readers, that it’s processed oats that have been treated with steaming and an extended heat treatment that are safe to eat as is. That said, “overnight oatmeal” is still not recommended.

The steaming and heating steps allow oats to be shaped, modifies the flavor, kills the many possible pathogens present (like ecoli and salmonella) and deactivates enzymes that would cause spoilage.

Truly raw grains should not be eaten. For example in the US the biggest danger of food poisoning from eating raw cookie dough, typically comes from the flour not the eggs. Incidentally, simply baking flour does not render it safe until moisture is added: https://ag.purdue.edu/news/2021/04/Home-kitchen-heat-treated...

I should also add that things like dry kidney beans contain toxins that need to be soaked and heated to boiling for a sufficient amount of time to destroy, otherwise even just a few can cause severe intestinal distress.

That's not what the cited article says. Instead, it says:

“But it’s not that simple in flour because Salmonella is more heat resistant when moisture is low. We still need more research data to confirm how hot you’d have to get the flour or how long you’d have to hold it at that temperature to make the flour safe to eat.”

You said "baking does not render flour safe". The article says we still need more research about "165 degrees", and does not even say baking flour at 165 degrees is unsafe. In other words, it could render it safe, we just don't apparently know.

- water purification/iodide tablets - Sawyer mini (life straw works too) to filter the water - rations - camping stove, white gas, waterproof matches, lighter - I may or may not have a firearm and may or may not bring it when me and my non-white partner go camping in eastern Washington/forks .... - Tanked water heater for potable water - fire extinguisher (granted I leave that in the car when camping) - poop bucket - solar panel+back up battery, assuming they survive any issues with the storm. I'm hoping a townhouse has enough barriers to protect against radiation given I keep the camping gear in the basement

I should probably print out some maps of things like resoviors, ports, and other critical infra/services in my area at some point.

This. When trying to make provisions for even modest disruptions, you quickly realize how herculean a task it is to be truly prepared. Unless you're already a self-sustaining farmer with a well/water source and other resources or (ideally) billionare-bunker capable, you can see how prepper-ism becomes a lifestyle beyond prepping for a relatively short period.

Making a choice between living life as it currently is and being prepared to survive indefinitely is a hard fork in the road.

But I've noticed a disturbing trend. A lot of people now have "continuous" pump/tank setups. A little pressure tank the size of a 20lb BBQ propane tank, just to allow for pressure stabilization, and a weaker pump. I guess cost is the motivator.

Sad, really.

Be on a government payroll and have the skills necessary to repair the damage.

If something like that happens but sustained long enough to cause a mob to loot the store (which the media would of course amplify), it wouldn't be long before there was widespread panic.

It's not the CME itself that terrifies me, but the knock-on effects.

But the vulnerable side then becomes the power grid and Internet backbone. Part of a resilient disaster plan would be to allow ACH and other payment traffic to take priority if we were relegated to a low bandwidth connection. If we cannot transfer money, we will collapse, plain as that, once panic over food security sets in.

An EE friend said that we do not have enough transformers to replace if a critical number of them fried. Substation level components could be a huge bottleneck if we had another Carrington event.

Or something similar.

It is easy to make that longer by keeping extras of stable food they normally eat. I like to keep extras of everything I use regularly. Which really helped during the pandemic.

But the other factor is, some people literally only eat pre-made food, which often a large portion consists of frozen things. I've been in some homes, mostly single people, which have no flour, rice, oats, etc. No real raw materials, such as eggs or butter. No canned food. Maybe a jar of peanut butter and a loaf of bread, and a package of processed meat in the fridge.

The rest are frozen things like prepared chicken wings, and so on.

What I wonder is, what are the percentages of people in these situations?

20%?

It's not especially noteworthy .. to those of us that also grew up away from large connected services - you have your own sewerage, generators, mail, drive | walk to town to pick things up.

Currently I'm "mostly" off grid - I have internet connection, a well, leach drains, solar + wind (electric) + wind (mechanical mill), etc and live in a rural community with a lot of people older than 60 who also grew up off grid.

Community resiliency is a natural instinct it seems. Rebecca solnit's "paradise built in hell" is a fascinating read on the subject.

What would a group that gets cheap and or throwaway groceries and feeds homeless do in a Fit-Hits-The-Shan or End-of-World scenario?

You’d have to hope some heavily agricultural minded types would be friendly to you and your labor potential.

If there are functional societies elsewhere in the world, then help in the form of food could be on its way. The question is, will it be distributed efficiently to the people who need it? Something like Food Not Bombs could respond quite effectively to such a situation.

Primarily volunteering with them creates two things that are basically the most important things in any emergency:

1. Knowledge of who to talk to and where to go when shit hits the fan

2. Established practices of organization

If community resources are scarce, and you have a FNB cohort in the community, you have a group of people with lots of practice stretching out food, preparing it, and redistributing it to many people. Again I recommend solnit, she wrote about this exact thing happening in one of SF's earliest devastating earthquakes.

The other upside is when the State turns up to fuck your community efforts up (like they did in SF, or Louisiana after Katrina) you also have a group with established methods of peaceful resistance. They probably already have clout with the local State enforcement group: the SFPD have gotten to the point where it's basically impossible to get them to harass FNB because of years of softening individual officers to the cause.

Edit: I see now you mean, practically speaking, what actions could they take.

Well in a place like NYC I have no idea. Probably there would be huge issues with famine. Realistically the first thing everyone should do is get the fuck out of that city lmao.

I don't know if SF would be so bad. There's also groups like Food Not Lawns trying to get people into growing their own food. If their efforts continue to be successful we can have closer to home food supply chains. As for convincing people to share, for some reason that isn't all that hard. When capitalism and its disincentives fall away, it seems people revert to our basic evolutionary advantage of social bonding and organization.

Not to mention all the dry goods stashed in stores throughout the city can be stretched pretty far by the people who have practice at it. If FNB minded folks can redistribute from the stores quickly enough they might even be able to get to the meat and etc to turn into jerky etc - hopefully they'd abandon veganism in an actual emergency. Knowing them, probably not lol. But if I'm there that's what I'm doing.

Others have written on the plight of cities in anarchy, and I don't think it's quite so doom and gloom. "Conquest of Bread" was the OG and I think it still holds up.

EDIT: Wow, I know HN wears rose-colored glasses when looking at the past, but come on, people. We didn't hallucinate the antimaskers, antivaxxers, and thousands of protestors deliberately ignoring stay-at-home. I worked with a health official who had her home picketed because she dared to involve herself in health policy. It's only been a few years and y'all are in denial already.

I'd rarely met the neighbors before then, but COVID really brought everyone together.

Though I lived in a pretty liberal and well educated area, not many anti-vaxxers around where I lived.

I think maybe you're thinking of a different definition of "community connections" than the parent poster. It's not _literally everyone around you,_ but the people around you that you trust and support and who will support you. Get as many of those as you can, as high quality as you can.

It's beneficial even if the world _doesn't_ go to shit, too! =)

The only disagreement I think is in the definition of community. We could either say that community is just, like, our extended circle of acquaintances; we’ve all got one and it isn’t very robust against disasters. Or we could say that a resilient community is some deeper thing on which people can lean in a disaster, but which needs to be carefully tended to, and most of us lack.

The latter is, I think, what the original poster meant.

Even the grid is probably fine if it's unplugged from transmission.

It does seem plausible that you could get fires as a result of electrical sparks off of long conductors (transmission and communication wires, pipelines, fences), such as with the Carrington event (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Geomagnetically_induced_curren...).

Both sparks from shorts and excess heating of conductors are possible ignition points.

n.b. I have not look at the paper.

It's the same as asking: how would you prepare if you were to travel back in time to 600 CE?

You need to be self-sufficient. You cannot rely on money for at least 18 months. You need to be somewhere with access to water, shelter and food. And not that many people. The only safe bet is to have an off grid 'bunker' or holiday home that you could ride out the global chaos for 2 years.

Worldwide grid outage is pretty low likelihood but if it happens everyone will be reminded of the worst aspects of human nature, and the cruel indifference of nature pretty fast.

Also, gasoline.

Of course if you're in Texas in midwinter when a CME happens, you are well and truly screwed.

A year of food stored and a really good place to hide from the hordes that want it. Very difficult imo.

These are very different things.

Part of the electricity bill here in Flanders is based on monthly power peak. I charge an EV at home, and by setting up the charging station to take into account consumption data from the meter, I have no problem staying below 7 kW. Okay, that's averaged over 15 minute time slots, but even the connection for my house is only rated 13.8 kW!

I think that's it, anyways; this is not my strong suit.

In the US we have single-phase (split-phase) 120/240v 200A service drops for houses, 48kW. Houses over 3,000 square feet with electric heating, electric ovens, electric water heaters, and electric air conditioning can push 150A peak demand, and a 200A service drop is not much more expensive for the utility than a 100A service drop. Most houses in my state have gas water heaters and furnaces so 200A is overkill for most people in my state.

A 7kW 240V single-phase load draws (7000/240) 29.1A

IIRC most of Europe gets 230V or 400V three-phase power for houses, so here’s both calculations.

A 7kW 230V three-phase load draws (7000/(230*1.732) 17.57A

A 7kW 400V three-phase load draws (7000/(400*1.732) 10.1A

The reasoning behind a 50kW for a house in the US is (probably a 48kW) generator is you can fully back up your 200A service (240V times 200A = 48kW) and not split out the generator loads into a subpanel.

Older houses in the US might have a 100A service, I’ve even seen 60A house services.

P.S. 1.732 is sqrt(3)

The North American residential electrical code limits how many circuits you can put onto a generator based on the circuit capacity, not the expected use. You aren't allowed to pinky swear that you won't run your electric oven and dry laundry at the same time. It doesn't matter that your generator will just trip its breaker or die.

So if you want to have most of your house on a permanently wired standby generator you need to wildly oversize that generator such that it can entirely replace utility power.

* Have solar installed on your home. Have some spare disconnected inverters, maybe even a couple of uninstalled panels.

* Grow some of your own food in a garden.

* Have good relationships with some of your neighbors.

* Know how to do stuff yourself, have some tools and building materials in your garage

* Have a bicycle

* Have a method to purify water

None of these things are bad ideas anyway. Just don't be absolutely reliant on just-in-time purchasing of life necessities and know enough to be able to figure stuff out on your own. More or less just go on an overnight backpacking trip once in a while without buying prepackaged everything and you'll be pretty good.

This will get you a handful extra meals, assuming the ideal case where everything was fully grown, harvested, and preserved before the incident. It's one thing to have a village harvest & jam cycle for the seasons, it's another to need to be prepared for the situation to change overnight, all alone and with only a home garden to work with.

You're better off using the money, time, energy, etc. to buy provisions that are immediately and near-permanently useful without the variability, climate sensitivity, and labor intensity of gardening.

And also, gardening is a high quality activity for you and your family at any time. It feels good eating a little bit of what you've grown, and there are lots of things that are either not possible or rather expensive to buy but simple to grow.

It's more about tripping out the grid, or sensitive inadequately-protected grid-connected electronics. Even then, the short will likely happen in the input stage of the power conversion, where repairs with salvage parts are not infeasible.

What do you call someone who puts their tablet and phone in the microwave? Preppy?

Put gas in your car. Impacts are likely to be regional, one town might loose power and another not. Be ready to move if needed.

Simply surviving something like this, provided you can rely on the grid coming back eventually, is mostly just hunkering down. The water requirements here are referring to what is needed to sustain activity. I was also a logistics officer for a combined arms battalion and the water needs of an infantryman fighting a war are quite a bit greater than a family hunkering down in their house. Drink whatever non-perishable liquid you have, slowly, and it will take at least a week before you dehydrate. If you're not already anorexic or some kind of extreme endurance athlete, it's going to take most people at least a month to starve. You won't have a pleasant existence, but as long as you stay in place and don't try to do anything, you can easily stay alive without much.

If you're talking true Walking Dead level post-apocalypse LARPing civilization is gone and not coming back, stored supplies do nothing but delay the inevitable. You need to learn how to live off the land and probably fight for it. Look at people taking shits in the street that Hacker News hates so much and see what they do to survive without working utilities and access to grocery stores. Eat trash. Drink rainwater. Stay out of sight as much as possible and look insane and dangerous when you're not out of sight.