Survive Infinite Dangers: The Family Survival Guide of 21st Century Dangers (7 page)

(Techie tip): Some people connect to metal natural gas pipes (as an “electrical ground”) because one is nearby. Possibly OK but do you really want to take a chance of an electrical spark igniting the natural gas entering your house? You might blow up your house and the homes of a dozen neighbors hooked onto the same gas line! Oh yes, oops! Almost forgot. Shut off the main gas line to your house as soon as you can after a disaster occurs. If the power goes out also shut off your main circuit breakers. A power grid system can go wild if uncontrolled putting out voltages between one and 300 volts. Three hundred volts coming into your house is going to blow everything plugged into wall sockets. These are the big breakers at the top of your electrical circuit box. Do this QUICK! This is a smart thing to do even when there’s not a disaster anytime your incoming electricity is unstable. Even a lightning storm – an electrical power pulse spike entering your house for any reason can do thousands of dollars worth of damage. Your homeowner’s insurance may cover it above your deductible but with deductibles going up these days, why take a chance! Know where those (usually a pair) of larger breakers are (usually at the top of rows of circuit breakers and be ready to turn them off when you sense your incoming electricity may be unstable or suffer a power spike. Worst case, you may have to reset some clocks when you reset the breakers an hour later.

Then shut off the gas. Pilot lights to furnaces and water heaters are supposed to have automatic shut-off valves. But don’t take chances; locate the gas shut-off valve and have a pipe wrench handy to turn it off. The turn off valve can be anywhere. Hopefully it is right where the line enters your house and is easily to get to. But it might be on your gas meter out near the street. Call your gas company if you need help locating your meter and how to turn off your gas. They are more than happy to help (for free) than to have you guess.

While we are on the subject of electrical discharge, there has never been a single case of a cell phone user blowing up a gas station! This fable was started by a single gas station owner having no electronic knowledge but wanting customers to pay attention to the ads blaring from the speakers near each gas pump or think of something they need to buy inside the station after buying gasoline. Gas stations often make no profit on gasoline sales so they need customers in the store buying milk and bread (or whatever). Any electronics engineer knows the miniscule power emanating from a cell phone could never cause a spark large enough to ignite a gas pump. Not even one with a hundred-fold increase in intensity! But many state legislators even turned the fable into state laws lobbied by gasoline companies! The power of ignorance combined with money! Remember the “Golden Rule”!

This radio or radios will be your life line to news of the world. Was the enemy nation destroyed? Do we still have any government at all? Is help on the way from other continents? Unless you are stealth, your one radio may be the only news your entire community receives. If you are on good terms with your small town’s police department and don’t fear them taking your store of supplies (quite a gamble!) keep the radio at your safe area and you will be protected by the city police 24/7 as they run messages back and forth to city hall. Tell them you are an engineer and that’s why only your radio works but if it is moved it will stop. It might work! 24/7 SWAT teams protecting your group! Hey, it could happen. But, as I say, you stand a major chance of losing all your survival supplies. I think I would just get news to city hall then fade back into my hidden (I hope) safe area.

Today’s entire high-tech world is controlled by devices each with hundreds to thousands to millions of semiconductors. The total number of semiconductor “junctions” in everything from alarm clocks to car alternators to television sets to cell phones is thought to be a mega-trillion (or more) in number. Just your pocket cell phone with its integrated circuits has many thousands of semiconductor junctions. Why are these junctions so fragile? Because they are often one millionth the width of a human hair! Send anything but the tiniest of electrical voltage and current through that TINY wire and it burns out – permanently.

Like I say, you are now essentially living in the 14
^th
century! Not even the 19
^th
century as we suddenly no longer have many of the tools of the 19
^th
century, the horses and buggies and all that made life run in, say, the year 1870. The author was employed by the contractor to the Atomic Energy Commission (nuclear weapons) the year scientists suddenly took EMP seriously realizing the first explosion would burn out all other incoming missiles! In the 1960’s continuing through today most military electronic equipment is “radiation hardened” including moderate protection from EMP. The junction wires are a bit thicker but they can’t be too thick or a laptop computer would be the size of a boat. So the equipment is super shielded and grounded. Just like walking across a rug on a dry winter day then touching something “grounded” like a lamp. You get “zapped”. It just stings but think of that times one trillion. Radio and TV tower and tall buildings are struck by lightning bolts in most lightning storms. But things like lightning rods, devices like GDT (gas discharge tubes), MOV (metal oxide varistors), ground rods and a bevy of devices that makes for a large industry protects everything from TV stations to gasoline stations to electric power stations to – the list goes on. For electronic equipment itself (like radios) the reason most military radios (and satellites) are so expensive is that they use semiconductors and protection devices meant to protect the equipment from everything but a direct hit of, say, a lightning bolt. What about all the billions of consumer devices? You can pay your electric power company to install gas discharge tubes at your main circuit box partially protecting your house from voltage surges or spikes from lightning (or EMP). Otherwise, you will end up with a house full of blown out electronic devices and even less prone to voltage spike surges devices such as refrigerator and furnace compressors and motors may burn out if your house is struck directly by a lightning bolt. This is not the MOV devices many utilities offer at a high price and install them where the electricity enters your house. If you want gas discharge tubes you may have to hire a contractor and you really need one right at where each device is plugged in as the house wiring after the MOV protection is an antenna and, if the EMP discharge is high enough in voltage even the house wiring is enough to pick up enough electricity for a microsecond to burn out many electric and electronic devices. IF you do call your electric power company, ask if they install gas discharge tubes or if they are (useless) MOV devices.

I recommend Transtector/PolyPhaser
www.transtector.com
as a manufacturer of quality gas discharge tube protection devices used by many thousands of commercial radio/TV/cell towers, etc. installations but there are other good companies as well. The author prefers to use what is considered to be the high quality of Transtector plus you can learn much on their Web site. Enough to learn how to protect your “retreat” or safe area and, if you like, your entire house from an EMP attack unless you are in visual range of the discharge and you might still be OK if you spend enough money on a thorough protection system. Just be prepared to spend money! Installations such as a TV station don’t hesitate to spend $300,000 on a good system designed around Transtector when the chances of a one thousand foot tower being directly struck by a lightning bolt at least once during every passing lightning producing rain storm is close to 100% protecting millions of dollars of sensitive electronic broadcast equipment is money they don’t hesitate to spend.

The author owns such a tower on a Colorado mountain top protected by a Transtector system protecting expensive electronic equipment with many transistors knowing the tower has endured hundreds of direct strikes since its installation in 1995 without a single transistor ever being damaged. Would it survive a nearby (i.e. one mile) EMP bomb discharge? I doubt it. THAT is how devastating an EMP bomb can be. Everything that is electronic is destroyed as well as many electric devices (a radio is electronic while a toaster is electric). Basically, your home is TOTALLY unprotected and if you are, say, 50,000 feet right below where the discharge occurred NOTHING will protect all of your electronic equipment except perhaps as just described.

How would you know a very high powered burst or bursts of a microsecond in duration but of billions of volts in intensity just occurred (most likely out of line of sight)? You might feel a slight static tingle for a millisecond just as happens if you are too close to a lightning bolt but not hit. If an EMP discharge attack discharge has just occurred and you have a pace maker that is a “must always work on every beat” your heart stops and you die. If you are in a vehicle built since the early 70’s, it just quits. The headlights might work and it might “crank” but getting it restarted, sorry, the electronic ignition is fried and the vehicle is dead probably for good. If you are unlucky enough to be riding in an airplane, the plane loses all power and crashes as the pilot tries to glide to a landing but can’t even do that since all of his controls are electronically controlled so all planes just fall from the sky. Trains, busses, subways and all means of transportation that depend on electronics stop dead. Only people like the Mennonites might not notice anything different. The intent of the (evil!) mass murdering enemy that triggered the EMP bombs was to generate static pulses so strong that even the protections now in use by radio and TV stations in the most lightning prone state in the Union (Florida) are not adequate and all radio and TV stations go off the air probably permanently. Are there some stations that have extreme EMP protection supplied by the government? Let’s hope so! That information is classified.

Let’s assume they ALL go off the air. Let’s say all this happens at 2 PM on a weekday. You just finished lunch and using your laptop computer working from home. You wait for it to reboot but it won’t. You turn on a transistor radio but hear nothing, how odd! You try other battery powered radios and you hear no stations. This is very odd! If you were one of the smart people who had the foresight to buy this book you purchased at least two AM/FM/SW (short wave) radios that can be powered by battery, by a built-in crank and by solar cells you have means to find out what happened while no one else does (unless they also had an EMP protected short wave radio - read on). And you shielded them from an EMP burst.

The radio MUST have good shortwave reception. The nearest station still on the air might be the BBC in London. You’ll listen as the shaken announcer says “all contact has been lost with North America. Equipment picked up single strong sparks in that direction but no radiation is being shown leading scientists to believe that EMP bombs have thrown North America back into the 14
^th
century”.

Except for a total nuclear attack or a complete biological attack leaving no one alive, this is THE worst kind of WMD attack possible. Total chaos and anarchy begins within hours. Looting, stealing and all of the worst of uncivilized mankind begin and build quickly. Police and the military are totally overwhelmed. All telephones are out, of course, so there is no 911. You are truly on your own. If the EMP attack was fairly weak, civilization might show signs of rebuilding in a few months. That is what this book is for. If the EMP attack “ended life as we know it” those who spent the time and money to live self-sufficiently for the rest of their lives will be the only survivors. Those who religiously followed the book written by Mr. Rawles and follows his extensive advice might survive for decades but in a mostly desolate Hell of a world. Personally, permanent Armageddon is not for me. This book it is intended for six months of survival, not six decades or 600 years of multi-generational primeval living.

Let’s hope you are provisioned for six months without leaving and you remain stealth so that the many roving gangs of desperate people don’t find you! The few times in history where total anarchy has reigned for months have from historical reports been “Hell on Earth”.

It’s possible a few far thinking “ham radio operators” also wrapped their transmitters and receivers in aluminum foil or stored them in the GS trashcan. There will probably be a few two-way radios either underground with no antenna connected or that managed to survive the EMP disaster for some other reason. They make first contact with London or Japan or somewhere civilization still exists.

A ham radio license is VALUABLE to have! My call letters are WØTM. Visit
www.arrl.org
for information on obtaining a license. It is very easy these days with recent changes made so that a few hours of studying will earn you a passing grade. The test is VERY easy, cheap and given every weekend all over the country. The ARRL can direct you to dozens of test sites as well as provide study material. A good “transceiver” (receiver and transmitter in one box) can be purchased used for well under $500; sometimes as low as $100. Make sure it works and erect an antenna. Then short the antenna connection and double wrap the radio in foil or store in trashcan. You may end up being the ONLY communications to the undamaged world for your entire city or state! Help will probably come in from all over the world. Hopefully, the rogue country or terrorist group responsible for the EMP bombs is destroyed or neutralized so that the EMP damage doesn’t happen more than once. Still, there are not enough resources in the world to save more than a small percentage of people in a continent thrown back into the 14
^th
century. Plan accordingly. But the world will try to recover unless the EMP attacks were world-wide and a world war is raging.

If help comes – great! If not, you are on your own. Plan on being on your own! If you are lucky enough to have formed a neighborhood survival group with each family having stocked and prepared according to this book then you CAN better survive the ruthless, starving mobs that WILL attempt to take from those who have prepared: “strength in numbers”. Talk to neighbors asking them to read this book. Can you get most of your neighbors to join you? If so, the more the better and the better provisioned and trained the better. A neighborhood each with its own safe area or multiple area groups using rechargeable (i.e. solar cells) two-way radio walkie-talkies (ham radio, GMRS or anything EXCEPT citizen’s band radios) can provide the communication to quickly put into place a formidable defense area of a few blocks in size. Rotate guards at road blocks and take care of each other; if there is a doctor or nurse in your group, so much the better. Count on each person having some skill useful to your survival group. Elect leader(s) in advance and choose wisely. Leadership in a time of a life and death situation can “go to someone’s head” leading to fighting within your group. Work out all potential problems in advance! Work out who does what in advance! Everyone must have jobs to do and be expected to do them.