Aurora(9)

Thom stifled a grim smile. Oh, I’m prepared, all right.

Singh continued. “Your repair time could be shorter out there, though.”

“How much shorter?”

“Depends on availability of equipment and the damage to manufacturing capacity.”

“A range, please?”

“Four to six months for the West Coast, as opposed to twelve to eighteen months for the rest of the country.”

“You’re saying portions of this country will be without power for a year and a half?”

“If you believe the 2013 Lloyd’s report, yes. Significant portions.”

Thom blew out a long breath. He glanced up and caught the eyes of Brady, his driver, who had been listening. Brady’s eyes flicked back to the road.

Thom looked back to Dr. Singh. “But most of the damage will be to the East and West coasts and certain areas of the Midwest. Is that right?”

“At first. I was talking about initial stages—impact to plus three or four minutes. But electrical collapse is contagious. The CME that hit Quebec in ’89 caused chain collapse as far south as Minnesota, and that was an off-angle contact. This is a direct hit from the largest energized plasma surge the planet has seen in several hundred years. I’d expect the latent effects of system collapse to ripple throughout the country—and the world, except for perhaps a belt around the equator—for up to thirty days afterwards. Eventually everything’s going down. Almost complete destruction of communications and other critical infrastructure.”

Thom paused for a moment. Since he was eighteen, he’d been a semi-professional disaster scenarist. The possibility of sudden, catastrophic collapse of one’s world was something he’d trained his mind to accept and prepare for. He’d lived it once and refused to repeat the experience. His prepping was an obsession, a sickness and compulsion rooted in personal experience and a profound need to never, ever be caught unaware again. He’d spent twenty years thinking of the worst, most unexpected things that could possibly happen to himself and his world, but never, not in his darkest moments or wildest prognostications, had he expected this. “This is all from one CME?”

“No. The data I’ve seen, and what NOAA is looking at right now, indicates a CME series in rapid succession, which will inject energy over a period of twelve to eighteen hours. Long-duration geomagnetic-induced currents will overwhelm anything we can do to stop them. Listen, I think I’ve got to—”

Thom knew what a wrap-up sounded like, but he wasn’t done yet. “What’s the government response so far?”

“Exactly what you see on TV. There is a robust campaign to get every transformer in the United States taken offline in the next six hours to prevent damage. If the transformers are shut down when the geomagnetic currents start coursing through our power lines, they can’t be damaged by it. They could be safely restarted over the next two weeks, as ambient energy levels dissipate. The system could emerge almost completely intact.”

“That’s fantastic. When will they start shutting down?”

Dr. Singh looked at him the way one looks at a slightly dim child. “They won’t, Thom. Power plants are state-controlled. The federal government can’t issue a directive or coordinate a policy. It’s up to each individual state. Even in the states where the governors are embracing the science, they’re still calling it only a ‘possibility’ of a collapse, rather than a certainty.”

“But it is a certainty?”

“This is happening. We’re going dark.”

“We know this, and no one will take their power system off the grid?”

“You try selling a voluntary fourteen-day blackout to your state’s population on just a couple hours’ notice. Listen, I have people here that are—”

Thom barreled over her. “OK, so this happens. What does the government do then?”

She ground her teeth, not bothering to hide her irritation now. But still, she stayed on the line, continuing to play the possible-donor game by a set of rules that were about to not matter anymore.

“FEMA will put the National Response Framework into action. In theory it establishes a complete and effective hierarchy for disaster response. Incident Command System reports to Incident Commander, who reports to DoD, who reports to the executive branch. But that won’t work this time.”

“Why not?”

“They will have no telephones or internet. There will be no centralized leadership. It will be impossible.”

Thom had one remaining question, and it was the most frightening of all. In every scenario he’d studied, the red line was always the same, the clear boundary that would separate the haves from the have-nots, the living from the dead.

“What about water?”

“Yeah, that’s the problem. First, it’ll be gasoline, though. When the grid shuts down, generators everywhere will switch on, including water-pumping systems. But the generators will burn through petroleum supplies fast. There are strategic reserves, of course, but those too will run out, as oil and gas pipelines will be among the most severely damaged structures in the initial EMP.”

“Why pipelines?”

“Long, conductive metal tubes carrying fuel? Why do you think?”

“They’ll explode?”

“If they’re corroded, yes. And anything with cracks in its welding will split, dumping its fuel into the ground. Once the strategic oil reserves are drained, municipal water pumps will cease to function. Freshwater will become like liquid gold.”