The prospect of an electromagnetic pulse attack has kept anyone who read William R. Forstchen's book, "One Second After" nervous for almost a decade. And those of us who hoped the people in charge would ramp up protection were left in the dark, so to speak.
But president Trump was prescient enough to issue an executive order that might stimulate those people who could actually make a difference. See Trump orders historic plan to thwart EMP, warns attack would be ‘debilitating’ from earlier this year.
The Electric Power Research Institute issued a report in April that suggested an EMP attack might result in as much damage as had been predicted.
But some steps could be taken to minimize the problems. The article Scientists Are Zapping Fake Electrical Grids to Help Us Survive an EMP Attack tells us some of the ways they might do it. Here's an excerpt:
The results showed that although some parts of power lines and transformer equipment were damaged by the pulses, they weren’t as drastically affected as some predictions presumed. And with the control houses, some structures held up better than others — namely the ones made with mostly metal, not concrete. The conductive qualities of metal make the control house act like a Faraday Cage, absorbing and dissipating the incoming energy so none reaches the electronics inside. While the modern-day metal control house designs weren’t totally EMP-proof, they did have better shielding qualities than their concrete counterparts.
The concept of a Faraday Cage has been with us for a long time. And if protecting the control houses actually works, then more power to them. But, it's probably too soon to stop worrying, especially with since cyber attacks would be so much simpler for an adversary to pull off.
P.S. That EPRI report is not without serious criticism. See EPRI EMP Report: Selling Snake Oil to America.
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4:33 PM 9/6/2019
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