We are a country dependent on technology and convenience, which requires electricity, and it could be shutdown in a matter of seconds. It wouldn't be a temporary blackout either. Every precious electronic device we depend on would essentially be fried. All it would take is a solar flare or nuclear detonation at the right altitude.

It's called electromagnetic pulse or EMP, and I've been writing about it since 2008. Our nation's enemies have known about this a lot longer, and so has our Sun. Yet nothing, or precious little according to the experts, has been done to protect the infrastructure, specifically, our power grid.

If you could, would you do something to prevent such catastrophic failure?

Would you put the cost or inconvenience concerns above protecting millions of lives, and civilization as we know it in this country?

We're only talking a few bucks a year if the utility companies followed through on the protections and passed it on to the consumer. Still it would be far less than your monthly smart phone bill, and by the way that too would cease to function in an EMP event.

Maine Representative Andrea Boland of Sanford, has been doing her homework and now national security experts say her proposed legislation, co-sponsored by Senator John Patrick of Oxford, if approved by the Maine Legislature, could literally "kick-start" the United States in the event of such an attack.

LD 131, An Act to Secure the Safety of Electrical Transmission Lines, has the attention of national security experts and it's now being considered by the Maine legislature's thirteen-member Committee on Energy, Utilities and Technology.

These national security and nuclear experts say the threat is not only real, but seriously underestimated by the federal government, and the partisan gridlock in Washington means the only effective, and truly proactive, action that can be achieved is through the states.

Now please remember, it doesn't necessarily require an Iran or North Korea to launch a nuclear warhead, although I'll be talking about that in my next article. An EMP can be caused by non-partisan Mother Nature. Just ask those in Quebec, back in 1989, when the lights went out.

According to Representative Boland, representatives from ISO New England testified at the first hearing on LD 131, that they had procedures in place to react to such an epic failure.

Think about how quickly your lights go out in a power failure.

It has the members of the Committee on Energy, Utilities and Technology questioning how reliable those ISO procedures would be when they couldn't "click" their way to a solution, or pick up their cell phone to communicate the problem.

I''ll have more on this issue with my next article, Got Power? The Blackout That Doesn't End-EMP by Terrorist Nations.

 

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