# 13 - "EMPs Don't Really Exist"
I got into a discussion with another prepper that stated that they do not believe in EMPs and they won't believe they are real until they see one for themselves. When he said that there is no such thing as an EMP I could only think of one thing - WTF, is he serious?
This is the type of person that as a child I will bet if his parent's told him not to touch the stove because it was hot and it would burn him, just wouldn't listen to them and just had to see for himself.
We have known about the effects caused by EMP events for almost 150 years since the first one we witnessed and recorded the destruction from in 1859 which was called the Carrington Event.
This event was caused by a Coronal Mass Ejection (CME) and sent a pulse wave of high voltage electricity through the telegraph wires damaging and causing fires at telegraph offices across the country. Several telegraph operators were injured receiving severe burns. It sparked several forrest fires and damaged the newly laid telegraph wires on the bottom of the Atlantic Ocean.
In 2015 we were barely missed by an even larger CME which packed enough power to knock us back into the stone-age if it would have hit the Earth.
Since the 1960's both the United States and Russia have conducted numerous high altitude nuclear detonations testing the effects of an EMP on power grids, electronics, radio waves, etc.
Congressional EMP Commission was assigned the task of studying EMPs and making recommendations to secure the national power grid from the effects of an EMP event. They released two public reports and testified to congress about their findings in 2008. Shortly after delivering their findings to congress which showed how unprotected and vulnerable the nation was to an EMP event, the commission was disbanded.
The Congressional EMP Commission was re-established by Congress in December 2015. Recently the Commission was once again disbanded and its reports taken off the EMP Commission website after their reports showed once again that we were still inadequately protected against an EMP.
Many officials in our own government are of this same mentality. It hasn't happened to us yet, so therefore it can't happen. Well, you haven't been struck by a lightening bolt yet either, but that doesn't mean that it can't happen.
I tried to explain to him how Hawaii saw first-hand the damaging effects of a very small EMP that was caused by the military trying to secretly detonate a nuclear bomb at high altitude almost 1,000 miles away from Hawaii in the middle of the Pacific Ocean in 1962.
Once the effects were noticed by the general public in Hawaii when the street lights were knocked out, the truth about the secret EMP test code named "Starfish Prime" had to be revealed to the public.
His response was that "we only believe it was an EMP because the government told us it was. They really just turned the lights off".
This was also his response to the March 3, 1989 geomagnetic storm that caused another very tiny and localized EMP that took out the hydroelectric plant in Quebec and which left seven million people in the Canadian province of Quebec without power for over nine hours. "They just turned the lights off".
This idiot believes that everything is a conspiracy by the government. Now don't get me wrong, I know for a fact that our government lies to us on a regular basis. Just look at the "War on Drugs" and the ongoing battle over cannabis, and don't get me started on the whole 9/11 coverup.
But this isn't mainly coming from our government, our government for the most part continues to ignore it. This is coming from scientists and researchers in in fields of physics, space weather, Earth and atmospheric sciences, as well as those studying the effects of an EMP on animals and humans. These people are using EMP simulators that cause very minuscule EMP events that they can test to draw results from. There has been a ton of research on EMPs in the last couple decades, yet may people still have their heads buried in the sand, refusing to see the truth.
It is ignorant people like this that gets my blood boiling. Apparently it doesn't matter how many scientists around the world all agree that there is such a thing as an EMP, nor how many countries study the effects of EMP damage, they still will not believe in them because they have not seen one for themselves. Hey Einstein, you can't actually see an EMP, they are invisible electromagnetic pulse waves of energy. All we can see is their destructive effects.
Super-EMP weapons like the ones that we already have proof that Russia and North Korea have in their possession are able to create an EMP pulse of 200,000 volts or more in a fraction of a second.
Some people need to take off their tinfoil hats, open their eyes to the real world, get a grip on reality, and stop thinking everything in the world is a conspiracy against them, Do your own research, but don't ignore the tons of evidence and research that has already been done.
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In upcoming episodes we will also take a look at "Water Purification & Sanitization" as well as "Vacuum Sealed vs. Mylar Bagged Food Storage". We will also take a look at the shelf-life of "Home Canned Foods" and the viability of using them in our emergency supplies.
Also we will have an episode on the need for a Wilderness First Aid training even if you live in a city. We will also take a look at the need for "Sanitation After A Disaster".
