Storm

Worst Case Scenario: Hurricane Sandy Is The Biggest Storm Ever To Hit The Northeast

The biggest storm to ever hit the northeast United States is creating a tremendous amount of havoc up and down the eastern seaboard. It is hard to describe how gigantic this storm actually is. From end to end, Hurricane Sandy is more than 1000 miles across. It is twice the size of the state of Texas, and meteorologists are calling this storm a "worst case scenario". It is currently coming ashore in New Jersey, but this is just the beginning. A winter storm approaching from the west is going to combine with Hurricane Sandy, and the combined storm is projected to hammer the northeast with wind and rain all the way through the end of the week. Meteorologists all over the nation are saying that they have never seen anything like this. Hurricane Sandy is the biggest storm in modern U.S. history, and earlier today the storm pressure was recorded to be even lower than the Long Island Express Hurricane of 1938. In fact, Hurricane Sandy has the lowest pressure ever recorded for any storm north of the state of North Carolina. On Monday evening it was packing maximum sustained winds of about 90 miles per hour, and hurricane-force winds could be felt as far out as 175 miles from the center of the storm. To say that this storm is a major disaster is a tremendous understatement. (Read More....)

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If One Storm Can Turn D.C. Dark For Several Days, What Would A Massive EMP Burst Do?

Sometimes we all get a little reminder of just how completely and totally dependent we are on the power grid. Massive thunderstorms that ripped through Ohio, West Virginia, Maryland, Washington D.C. and Virginia left millions without power over the weekend. At this point it is being projected that some people may not get power back until the end of the week. The "super derecho" storm that pounded the Washington D.C. area on Friday night with hurricane-force winds is being called unprecedented. But the truth is that there are other events that could happen that would be far more damaging to our power grid. For example, a substantial EMP burst over a major U.S. city would fry virtually all of the electronics in the city and take the power grid in the area down indefinitely. A gigantic EMP burst over the entire country (caused by a massive solar storm or a very large nuclear explosion high in the atmosphere) could theoretically take down the entire national power grid. Just try to imagine a world where nobody has any electricity, nobody can pump gas, nobody can use their credit cards or get any more money, where most vehicles won't start, where nobody has the Internet, where all cell phones are dead and where nobody can heat or cool their homes. That is how serious an EMP burst could potentially be. We are talking about an event that could be millions of times worse than 9/11. (Read More....)