Why Prepare? Philosophy & Basic Concepts [PART 1]
PART 1: HOW BAD COULD IT BE?
Disasters come in all shapes and sizes. They have different odds of happening. Some are more or less likely or unlikely, but if the potential impact is severe enough, it's at least worth consideration. Disasters affect different spans of time: they could be short-term, long-term, or permanent -- becoming the "new normal," as we've heard so often these last few years. They affect different people in different areas in different social and economic situations in different ways.
You could have a personal disaster. You or someone important to you could suffer a severe injury, or be diagnosed with a disease, or have a heart attack or stroke or aneurysm. You might have a sudden loss of income. You could be the victim of identity theft, or your property might be stolen or damaged by fire or vandalism.
Often, though, when people talk about disasters, they're thinking of something wider in scope. Something might impact your neighborhood or city. There might be a tornado, or a flood, or a natural gas leak, an industrial explosion, a train derailment, a terrorist attack, a plane crash, a building collapse, or some combination.
Some disasters can affect an entire region, like a hurricane, an earthquake, or a prolonged power outage. The Northeast Blackout of 2003 affected 10 million Canadians and 45 million Americans across eight different states, directly or indirectly leading to nearly 100 deaths. These included some people who relied on electrical devices for medical purposes, some who died of carbon monoxide poisoning after running gas-powered generators indoors (don't do that), and at least one man who died in a fire started by candles used for lighting.
Back in 1906, a massive earthquake caused fires to break out across San Francisco, destroying more than 80 percent of the city and killing more than three thousand people. This event traumatized California, which has been waiting ever since for the next "Big One." The US Geological Survey believes the San Andreas Fault has in fact now reached a sufficient stress level for a major quake to hit the Los Angeles area at any time, causing a projected $213 billion in damages and about 1,800 deaths.
And as bad as that could be, an earthquake off the cost of the Pacific Northwest in what is known as the Cascadia Subduction Zone would probably be many times more devastating. Cascadia can produce what are called mega thrust earthquakes, along with tsunamis projected to reach 30 meters or a hundred feet tall. For such a quake, FEMA estimates 13,000 deaths and 27,000 injuries, with a million people displaced from their homes and another two-and-a-half million requiring food and water. They also anticipate that about a third of public safety workers won't respond to the disaster due to infrastructure collapse, more concern for their own safety and their loved ones, or being caught up in the casualties themselves.
Occasionally, there are disasters on a national or international scale, and especially at this level, one disaster can lead to others, making an already bad situation even worse. You might have drastic economic instability, perhaps caused by or leading to military conflict, or the global spread of a highly infectious disease. At this scale are also rare but real natural disasters, such as the eruption of a super volcano like Mount Tambora, which spewed massive amounts of volcanic ash and sulfuric acid into the atmosphere, causing a drop in global temperatures and resulting in the Year Without A Summer in 1816, when crops failed around the world and tens of thousands of people died in a massive global famine. In North America, the Yellowstone caldera in Yellowstone National Park is actually a super volcano, and it comes up in discussions from time to time, but geologists don't believe it's likely to erupt again any time soon (so you can probably rest easy on that one, at least for now).
Perhaps more likely for this scale of natural disaster is a solar Coronal Mass Ejection (CME). This is a large eruption of charged plasma from the surface of the Sun which, if it were to collide with the Earth, could lead to massive damage to our electrical power grids as well as the thousands of satellites currently in orbit, including those needed for GPS navigation and Internet communications. This kind of solar storm occurred in September of 1859 and has come to be known as the Carrington Event, during which telegraph systems across Europe and North America failed, giving their operators electric shocks and throwing sparks that caused fires. A few operators reported that they found they were still able to send and receive messages even though they had disconnected their power supplies! If a CME of a similar magnitude were to strike today, the effects it would have on our modern technology could be utterly crippling. In fact, on July 23, 2012, we just barely missed such a storm, and another could occur at any time with little warning.
A similar but even more devastating effect can actually be intentionally caused by humans. An Electromagnetic Pulse (EMP) can be produced in several ways, most notably with a high-altitude nuclear detonation which ionizes the stratosphere, causing an amplification effect that can span an entire continent. On July 9th, 1962, the United States conducted the high-altitude detonation known as Starfish Prime, the largest nuclear test ever done in space. It caused an EMP much larger than expected, driving the measuring instrumentation off the charts and causing electrical damage 900 miles away in Hawaii, knocking out hundreds of street lights, setting off burglar alarms, and damaging the telephone system. This event also formed radiation belts around the planet that caused at least six satellites to fail. Today, a single nuclear warhead detonated at high altitude over Kansas could absolutely devastate North America from coat to coast, instantly destroying critical infrastructure such as electrical transformers at major distribution nodes (for which we have no ready replacements), leading to a nationwide power outage that could last in many areas for more than a year.
And that's not the only way the power could go out. The nature of our electrical grid being constructed in a patchwork over time by a multitude of companies employing technologies as they were being developed, operated by utilities in business to make a profit, and regulated by government officials unfamiliar with the latest advancements in cybersecurity, all leads to a situation where our power grids are now incredibly vulnerable to attack over the Internet by a foreign government, a terrorist organization, or even a determined individual, any of whom can operate from nearly anywhere in the world and remain potentially untraceable.
Cyber warfare is the new frontier for international conflict, with high stakes in the real world, including not only the integrity of the power grid but also the banking and healthcare systems, and of course the government and military.
Also, there are at least 13,890 nuclear warheads in the world, 3,750 of which are currently active, held by at least eight and probably nine different countries, many of whom really do not like each other, and some of which are run by authoritarians that might do anything out of desperation or revenge if they believe their power is under imminent threat.