Only days ago, WBAY2 in Madison, Wisconsin published this story in which they reported upon an upcoming full-scale training exercise known as 'Dark Sky' that will take place in several Wisconsin counties between May 15th through May 17th, with the drills simulating a long-term massive power outage.
Reporting that utility companies, law enforcement and first responders will participate and door to door home visits will be made by the National Guard, with soldiers knocking on doors and passing out emergency preparedness information, we're warned in the videos below that if we are not prepared for such a very real, worst-case situation as a long-term power grid outage, there will be no coming back for America.
An electrical pulse from the sun so powerful that it burnt out the cable under the Atlantic ocean connecting Europe to America, Dr. Pry warns us that "we're a million times more vulnerable to an EMP now" than we were then in 1859 as heard in the outstanding video interview which we've embedded in full at the bottom of this story.
Discussing the very real, but overlooked for years, dangers that we face from an EMP, the 'relatively inexpensive fixes' that still haven't been implemented and what might happen to America should we continue along this road, Dr. Pry gives us a sign of hope by grading President Trump an 'A+' in his willingness to protect the grid, becoming the 1st president to include EMP protection in his recently released National Security Strategy. Also telling us that the difference between President Trump and President Obama on protecting America from an EMP was like 'night and day', Dr. Pry tells Levin he hopes President Trump's moves are not too late.
Also telling Levin that NO EMP Commission recommendations were implemented by the Obama administration, despite the fact that the EMP Commission was created by Congress, Dr. Pry tells Levin that when dealing with an existential threat to our entire nation such as an EMP attack or catastrophic solar superstorm, we'd want to take every opportunity to mitigate such an attack or event: "you want the belts and suspenders."
Dr. Pry also defends preppers and survivalists while telling us about his father's generation, which not only lived through World War 2 but also the Great Depression, a time when Americans needed to be 'their own first line of defense' as the people living in that era had seen government fail both in times of peace and times of war. As Dr. Pry tells Levin, during the Great Depression, Americans HAD TO BE their own 'first line of defense' because government surely wasn't coming to save them.
Yet when we look at our world today, preppers and survivalists are called 'crazy' when they're actually MANY steps ahead of everybody else should SHTF and we suddenly arrive at 'TEOTWAWKI'.
Dr. Pry tells us how his father fed his family by hunting woodchucks and heating his home via coal that had fallen off trains along railroad tracks while they grew their own gardens for food and his mother was constantly canning goods.
Also discussing other protections that we can take to protect ourselves as individuals from EMP such as using faraday cages, having emergency generators, and preparing with long-term food and water storage, this interview is an excellent, all-around discussion about prepping for EMP, national security, our electrical grid and why our grid hasn't been hardened yet.
When Levin and Dr. Pry talk about Russia's new hypersonic nuclear weapons that we have no equals to, Dr. Pry tells us that we can 'equal the playing field' by installing the space based missile defense projects of Ronald Reagan such as 'Brilliant Pebbles', space based interceptors that can take down missiles during nearly all phases of the missile flight.
Dr. Pry and Levin also go over the electrical grid here in America, which is owned by many different private companies and not the government, and explains the three grids that we have here in America, the Eastern grid, the Western grid and the Texas grid. Interestingly, the state of Texas is the only state in the USA which has its own electrical grid.
Dr. Pry tells Levin why we are so completely vulnerable to an EMP attack or solar superstorm that takes down our grid - we don't make most of the parts of the grid within the US and the huge EHV (extremely high voltage) transformers, of which there are approx. 2,000 in the USA, have to each be made, individually, by hand (they cannot be mass produced). Dr Pry warns that if they are destroyed, it would basically end us as a civilization for if we lost only half of our EHV transformers, it would take the entire world 5 years to replace them as only about 200 such tranformers are created all across the planet every year.
For those who still don't understand how completely dependent Americans are upon electricity to live our day to day lives, Dr. Pry takes the example of a single apple which, to make it from the apple orchard to the store, relies upon hundreds of electronic systems to get it from one place to the other. Warning us that ALL of our critical infrastructure in America depends upon electricity, he tells Levin that during the EMP Commission's studies, they couldn't possibly find a way to keep ALL Americans alive should we suddenly be hit with a long-term nationwide power outage, thus their predictions that 90% of Americans would die in the following year to 18 months.
With only a 30-day supply of food here in America to feed the entire country at any given time, imagine that supply coming to a sudden, grinding halt, along with the flow of water, Americans would suddenly find ourselves living in another era.
With such a long-term outage also leading to hospitals no longer functioning, airplanes falling out of the sky once the attack hits and modern, computer-driven cars to cease functioning while nuclear power plants across the country go full-blown Fukushima, Dr. Pry reiterates to Levin that these warnings are no 'conspiracy theory' nor 'fear mongering' but a very real potential worst case scenario.
Urging us to look at what happened to Puerto Rico, where they still haven't completely recovered from Hurricane Maria now 7 months after the island was struck, completely decimating their electrical grid, "there but for the Amazing Grace of God go we". Yet Dr. Pry warns we still face that same and very real existential threat that could lead to our destruction.
As Dr Pry tells us, should a nuclear weapon be detonated between 30 and 300 kilometers above America, within the vacuum of space, we wouldn't even hear the explosion, and there would be no 'blast effects' nor radioactive fallout, yet the damage done to our country would be irreversible. And 'enemies of America' have already been 'poking around' we are told, probing for weaknesses in our defense systems. Dr. Pry and Levin also go over many different scenarios of how America could be attacked with an EMP.
While the approximately 2 billion dollars that it would take to completely harden the grid might sound like a huge amount of money, when we consider that during the Obama administration, he gave that much money to Pakistan alone, hardening the grid should be a no-brainer. "Mustard money" for an electrical industry with very deep pockets, and very deep connections to Washington DC.
So why hasn't the grid been hardened when a Congressional Committee has warned that such an event would be an 'existential threat' to America? As Dr. Pry tells us, while he was a member of the EMP Commission, the Obama administration didn't even want to hear about nuclear EMP and refused to meet with Dr. William Graham, one of the world's foremost experts on EMP, while doing everything they could to sabotage and undermine the EMP Commissions work.
Warning us also that ANYBODY with only one nuclear weapon could become a nuclear super power that could threaten the very existence of the USA should they launch such a weapon off of a ship in the ocean via missile or even a hot air balloon, Dr. Pry tells us that hardening the electrical grid didn't fit the Obama administrations narrative of 'a world without nuclear weapons' nor fit into his narrative of the Iran nuclear deal, thus allowing this mortal threat to the existence of America to continue.
Once again emphasizing that if we are not prepared for this possibility, there'll be no coming back for America and as of now we have still NOT protected ourselves from this grave threat, Dr. Pry tells us that Congress 'as a whole' takes this threat seriously BUT we need to take it even more seriously and harden the grid before it is too late.
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