Off the grid: No phone, no light, no internet, not a single luxury

The 1986 book "Warday" covered the effects of EMP quite extensively. All nukes emit EMPs of varying intensity.


Basically any motor vehicle built after about 1980 would be pretty much fucked.

In addition of course to all solid-state electronics, computers, etc etc etc. Anything with a chip or transistor in it.

 

That's pretty much what happened in this guy's book. He based it on real government reports on what would happen if such a weapon were used. Some people argue that the effects of an EMP are overstated, which is fine. It's a work of fiction, and if this is what could happen, the book seems to take a pretty realistic view.

 

In the ice storm that hit here a few years ago, my neighborhood (all of four houses, mind you) lost power. But my aunt, whose neighborhood you can walk to from my house, had power. My mom and step-dad stayed at the house and ran a generator to the living room, while my sisters, grandma, uncle and myself camped out at my aunt's for the week.

That was fun.

 

Good thing I live in the ghetto then. Plenty of folks around here with 1960s and 70s cars.

 

Something else handy to keep in case of a blackout is an old-style Western Electric telephone. Just about all the modern cordless phones will not work when the power's out. The old phones get their power off the phone system and will work.

 

Pretty sure most of the actual landline phone systems are now run through computerized relay stations and if the power goes off, they're fucked too.

 

One funny thing about EMP is that in the movie "Independence Day," among all the other insanely anti-scientific plotlines, they made sure to have Vivica A. Fox make her escape in a 20-year-old construction truck -- presumably all the newer vehicles' ignitions had been fried by EMPs from the aliens' destructo-beams.

After she got off work at the strip bar, of course. When aliens are coming to nuke the world, nothing more important than to drop in at the titty bar to pick up your check and take one last shift on the pole. While your 6-year-old son is sitting in the dressing room helping all your stripper friends adjust their feather boas.

 

During post-Katrina and Gustav outages, the corded phone worked fine. The cordless did not.

 

They didn't know the aliens were going to destroy them yet, although Vivica had a bad feeling about them. The one airheaded stripper went to the building with her welcome sign, and ended up getting zapped.