Specifically, in danger of being left without electrical power for *years* in the event of a sizable solar storm.
DHS: 100 Million Americans Could Lose Power in Major Sun Storm
The study said a future solar storm like the great magnetic storm of May 1921 would black out most states east of the Mississippi River along with most states in the Pacific Northwest.
Neat. Makes for a fun read. A less catastrophic reading of a major solar storm disaster would leave 10 million Americans without power for months. In either case, the death toll would be remarkable, especially if it hit the north in winter… or the south in summer.
You’d think that after a couple decades of scientists and government officials freaking out over the possibility of solar storms or EMP attacks trashing the grid and blowing out innumerable transformers, backup systems would be in place.
Every winter I seem to see reports from Dallas or Atlanta getting shut down by some relatively trivial ice storm because they don’t have enough snowplows to deal with it, when if these cities simply bought one single solitary truck a year, fifty years later they’d have fifty trucks (and these things last fricken forever). If FEMA simply bought X number of transformers per year and put them into secure storage, then if the worst happened they’d have a stockpile to start over with.
Such a threat is also a good reason to get away from the Ginormous Electrical Grid model. In simplistic terms, the longer your power lines, the bigger the risk from EMP; so it makes sense to chop the grids up into smaller sections. This also argues for smaller self-contained nuclear powerplants as a major source of electrical power.