Some of my clients wish to have discussions about EMP threats and their ability to withstand them. Will this have an effect on your organization in the future?  I recently read a report out of Oak Ridge National Laboratory where they discussed this. Much of this is paraphrasing their research.

The reason that EMP is getting more attention now is that the critical infrastructure that sustains our lives as well as our business organizations are becoming increasingly sensitive to the effects of EMP; and critical infrastructures like the Internet, power grids, pipelines and traffic both air and vehicular are becoming increasingly dependent upon electronics. The cars themselves may stop dead in their tracks if affected by an EMP attack.

An interested party could  protect against EMP, but they are very rarely being used and even if some segments are protected other portions which are not would cause huge problems and delay the recovery.   This issue is being discussed now as government officials are quietly alerting the country that there are real concerns here. In a recent appearance on a news network, Peter Pry the director of a bipartisan Congressional Committee told FOX News that a powerful EMP weapon could so disrupt our technological society that large parts of our population would starve or die of disease. An EMP has the ability to make our society collapse in a worse case situation.

Russia has already experimented with such technology in their conflict in the Ukraine by jamming drones which losing communication or experiencing damaged circuity simply fall from the sky. ( A recent episode of “Scorpion” showed the geniuses using this technology only to find that some drones are shielded and can resist the  electromagnetic pulse interference.)  The Ukraine then had to harden their communications and drone technology to resist these electromagnetic weapons.

Our own government uses similar devices to make a cell phone grid lost communication by jamming the towers. Imagine our society if cell phones were useless.  Many of us no longer use landlines. And landlines are no guarantee of continued communication.

Hurricane Sandy followed by a massive snow storm gave those of us in the Northeast a taste of what an EMP could do to us. We were without power for weeks and the internet was down.  The Cloud was down and major data centers had no fuel for their generators and no way to reach their fuel supplier and when some did, they found that in a national emergency, the government shut down roads.  The emergency vehicles could not find fuel as gas stations were closed due to the lack of power and the owners were stuck in their homes.  This was only a taste of what an EMP could do.

Many of us installed propane powered generators. Certain precautions were taken and I believe we are more hardened and prepared than before.  Some added wood burning capability to their homes.

An EMP event would be equivalent to a large lightning bolt hitting each and every structure, damaging the wiring grid, the computers, the electronic technology in refrigerators, HVAC and so on. Since there is no warning, how does one prepare?

The benefits of magnetic shielding in a Faraday Cage and other shielded circuits are well known and two areas which have adopted shielding are in military facilities and in certain offsite storage facilities which store the back-up computer tapes necessary for disaster recovery. If the data center operator has not protected the server environment, and stored certain key components that might need to be replaced after an event, then the back-up tapes will be of less benefit in the near term recovery.

For example a 80 db. Faraday Cage would reduce the EMP by a factor of 10,000 for a target facility but very few facilities outside of the Military would be built to this level.  This Faraday Cage would reduce a 20,000 volts per meter EMP field to 2 volts per meter which would not harm electronic devices.  While this high level of shielding is necessary for some critical applications:  McDonalds, Dunkin Donuts, Pizza Hut?  Better keep some cash on hand as I am pretty sure Pay Pal and iPhone Pay will not be working.

But the good news for many of us is that even an imperfect shield is quite helpful and may be all that is necessary. Some forethought could protect your business and your family.  Years ago none of us used Ground Fault Circuits (GFC outlets and breaker devices)  in our homes or businesses but now GFC is prevalent in all new construction. Keeping certain devices such as a spare refrigerator, last years lap top with your records on it, and shielding certain devices. I am not an electrical engineer but some research might be beneficial to protecting your family and your business records from a catastrophic even.

This topic is on the radar of most Risk Management professionals due to solar storms back in 1989 up in Quebec. The solar flare  disturbed the entire magnetic field of the Earth but most prominently in Canada.  (The effect of the solar storm tends to be much greater near the geomagnetic poles.)  The electrical power grid of Quebec was shut down by a solar storm on March 13, 1989, and in less than two minutes the effect was to create a complete shut down of the power grid and the loss of one power grid can then cascade to overload other grids that are linked.  

We had shielded vaults up in Northern Quebec and no damage was done to the servers or the back up tapes in our vaults and adding that capability to our vaults was not as expensive as we originally thought.  But you must plan in advance.  We have over 100 vaults that we installed in Offsite Media Storage companies so options exist to choose a vendor who has already planned ahead for you.

If I could include pictures, I would attach one showing me after Katrina and the Winter Storm in bed with my three dogs staying warm. ( Remember the Band  “Three Dog Night” which referred to a night so cold the Alaskan natives would bring in three sled dogs to sleep with, to avoid freezing to death.  But today I have special shielding and a back up generators kept offline but ready to flip the switch.

EMP devices are no longer science fiction. Our infrastructure is more fragile than ever and becoming ever more susceptible.  I have had several clients contact me about this lately so the appearance of experts on TV is making corporations start asking questions.  Hopefully this might help you prepare.

Last year people were asking about protection from Tesla (T) fields and now it has progressed to EMP. Protecting your back up tapes from magnetic fields of 1850 - 1900 Oerteds is the level at which they would be destroyed. Faraday shielding, opto-isolation of input and output circuits and power line filtering would protect many of the electronic components. How much of this is practical would make for a nice risk management session.

I have been asked to write White Papers on this as an aid to opening a discussion in a corporation.  If anyone has this come up, let me know and I will send you some of what I prepared.  As I said, I am not the expert but it asked questions and then provided reference sources that the organization then hired experts to develop their specific solution.


Hugh Smith


FIRELOCK Fireproof Modular Vaults
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(610)  756-4440    Fax (610)  756-4134
WWW.FIRELOCK.COM



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