36 Hours: A Post-Apocalyptic EMP Survival Fiction Series (6 page)

She paused the television while waiting for Alex. They both enjoyed watching
Big Brother
on CBS, and tonight’s episode was going to reveal a new twist in the final weeks of this season. Finally, growing impatient, she yelled upstairs for Alex.

“Hey, are you finished with your homework?” Madison hated yelling through the house. Maybe she should’ve sent her daughter a text message. She laughed to herself at how lazy Americans had become.

“Yes, Mom,” Alex hollered back, with a dose of teenage girl sarcasm. “I’ll be there in a minute.”

Madison switched her iPad to Instagram and repeatedly double-tapped the
heart
button, indicating her approval of a particular image. She just wasn’t into it, so she set down her iPad and headed up the winding staircase to Alex’s bedroom. Their home was larger than the three of them needed. Besides the obligatory guest bedroom, they could have easily eliminated the formal living room, which gathered dust, and the other two upstairs bedrooms, which contained older, space-filling furniture.

The upstairs was Alex’s domain. Her room looked like a page out of the Pottery Barn Teen catalog. Alex was not a girly-girl. As she got older, her styles gravitated to classic designs—very Hamptons. White and blues were prevalent in the furnishings. Paintings of famous oceanfront golf courses like Pebble Beach and Mauna Kea in Hawaii provided wall coverings. There were no posters of Justin Bieber or, heaven forbid, Kanye West. Alex enjoyed music. She just didn’t want to stare at it all day.

Madison entered the mysterious domain of the teenage girl and found Alex on her iMac. Expecting to see Snapchat or Periwinkle or Periscope or some such, Madison was surprised to see the scorching red sun rotating on her computer screen.

“Hey, Mom, check this out.”

“Is this a new way to get a suntan?”

“Very funny,” replied Alex with a roll of her eyes. “No, look at this website. It’s called SolarMonitor.org.”

Madison laughed to herself as she pulled up a chair.
Most parents are worried about their kids being propositioned by pedophiles online. My kid is watching the sun rotate.
Madison thought there could be a bumper sticker concept in all of this.

“Tell me about it,” said Madison.

“This was one of the websites Mr. Stark told us about in class today. The other two were SpaceWeather.com and SpaceWeatherLive.com. You can learn so much about the sun from these sites.” Alex navigated through the web pages and showed Madison the various tools available.

She stopped on the image revealing the sun in its present status. Using this particular satellite view, the sun appeared to be a variety of shades of purple with a fainter halo protruding from its surface.

“This is the sun right now as it faces the earth,” said Alex.

“Is this normal?”

“Yes. The sun has good days and bad days. On the good days, there is very little activity, which means no solar flares.” Alex pointed to the monitor and ran her fingers across the bottom pointing to the lower half of the sun. “See here. NOAA states there are no active regions in this view. Active regions are areas for solar flare potential.”

“Okay. This is good, right?” asked Madison.

“Oh, this is good,” started Alex. “But this—not so much.” She navigated the cursor to a link marked
far side
.

“Wow,” exclaimed Madison. “What happened to it?”

“Mom, this is the far side of the sun, which will be rotating back around and pointed at us soon,” Alex explained. She ran her fingers around the massive void encompassing the top half of the sun. “Do you see this? This is a coronal hole. A coronal hole produces solar flares.”

“Are they always this big?”

“I don’t think so, Mom,” replied Alex. Alex reached into her book bag and pulled out a physical science book. She turned to the section on space sciences and found the image she was looking for. She handed the book to her Mom and pointed at the textbook image. “This is a coronal hole capable of producing an X-class solar flare.”

Madison took the book out of her daughter’s hands and studied it, thumbing the pages back and forth. The caption read that the coronal hole depicted in the textbook version created an X3 solar flare. Madison held the book next to the monitor to look at the similarities of the two images.

“See, Mom,” started Alex. “There’s no comparison. If the picture of the sun in my book produced an X3-class flare, imagine what this coronal hole, which is twenty times larger, might produce?”

“What’s the next larger flare after an X?”

“There isn’t one. X is the last letter and the largest of the classes. An X2 is twice as powerful as an X1. An X5, considered huge, is five times larger than an X1, and so on. The largest on record is an X28 that occurred in 2003.”

Madison continued to study the two images. “Alex, the current sun image is easily twenty times larger than your textbook image.”

“Yes, twenty times an X3,” said Alex.

“What’s twenty times three?” asked Madison, who was beginning to understand the magnitude of this.

“It’s still sixty, Mom,” replied Alex. “That could make an X60.”

Madison dropped the book with a loud thud on the hardwood floor.

Chapter 10

26 Hours

9:00 p.m., September 7

Space Weather Prediction Center

Boulder, Colorado

“Our star—the Sun—is a bubbling, boiling ball of fire,” explained the tour guide to a group of middle-school-age kids from Salt Lake City. She was walking along the concourse, pointing to a series of high-definition images on the walls. She stopped and directed the group’s attention to the latest imagery from SOHO—the Solar and Heliospheric Observatory. “The Sun constantly belches out great clouds of hot gas. This gas is all charged up with electricity, too. This stuff travels at astounding speeds, some of it right toward Earth!”

The predominantly pre-teen group of children burst out in giggles after hearing the words
belch
and
gas
in the same sentence. Their teacher, who stifled a smile, admonished them to settle down.

“What happens if it hits Earth?” asked a composed young man from the group.

“Thank goodness Earth’s magnetic field and our atmosphere protects us from most of the blast,” she replied, pointing at a colorful image of Earth and the invisible magnetic lines of force, which exit near the south pole and re-enter near the north pole. The guide ignored a few more giggles. “Otherwise, the Sun’s weather would become our weather. Yikes, right?”

The SWPC tour guide had a way of using voice inflection to create a sense of drama. If you didn’t know better, you’d think she was trying to scare the children. This was her last tour of the day, and it was specially arranged for the early evening hour by a congressman’s office.
A nighttime tour deserved a little extra drama
.

She continued along the corridor, explaining the impact of solar winds, how the northern lights were created, and what happened when the sun got
restless
.

“Watch this animated GIF of the sun during a period of restlessness,” she started. The graphic image of the July 14, 2000, Bastille Day eruption played a constant, looping animation of the full-halo X5.7 flare, which subsequently caused an S3 radiation storm.

“Wow!” said one of the kids.

“Here it comes,” exclaimed the tour guide gleefully. “See these sudden, intense hiccups and burps? These are called solar flares and coronal mass ejections.”

“The sun has solar indigestion!” The children’s teacher laughed, but for once, the kids were focused on the presentation.

“I guess you could say that,” added the tour guide. “But the effects of these types of space weather events are not so pretty. When all of these X-rays and charged particles reach Earth, they can cause trouble.”

The children stopped talking amongst themselves and turned their attention to the guide.

“Like what?” asked one child with trepidation.

“Bad space weather can interrupt radio signals. It can damage satellites. Ships at sea may not be able to use their navigation equipment. Their two-way radios may not work. And sometimes, the power of the sun can cause damage to the electrical systems that bring power to our homes.”

“Like a blackout?”

“That’s right,” she replied. “That’s why the SWPC—the Space Weather Prediction Center—is so important. Just as we need early warnings about hurricanes, tornadoes, and other bad weather, having early warnings of bad space weather helps us keep damage from solar flares to a minimum.”

She led the class down a corridor and through a double set of doors. The group entered a soundproof, glass-enclosed auditorium overlooking the scientists inside the Space Weather Forecast Office of the SWPC. Monitors provided multiple views of space and the sun. Some screens provided external views of orbiting satellites, and there was a constant stream of data and numbers being produced on the large displays in the center of the room.

The kids settled into the theater-style seating, and the tour guide was about to continue her presentation when one of the children spoke first.

“Are those two men going to fight?”

*****

“We can’t keep a lid on this!” said one of the space forecasters as he slammed down a pile of time-lapse photos of the sun.

“You don’t think I know that,” replied his adversary, who was also his superior. “But it hasn’t done anything yet. How do I justify raising an unprecedented threat awareness based upon no track record?” The two scientists stared at each other, hands on hips, with only a cluster of computer monitors separating them. All eyes were on them, including the visiting schoolkids in the gallery.

The SPWC Forecast Center was jointly operated by NOAA and the U.S. Air Force. Its primary responsibility was to provide global warnings for disturbances that could affect people and equipment impacted by everything from solar flares to asteroids. The services they provide influenced the decision-making processes of NASA, the armed services, the FAA, the Department of Transportation, and FERC—the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission, which regulated the power grid.

The men remained in a standoff until the scientist, after deliberately pounding the keyboard of his computer, brought the far-side image of the sun on all the large wall-mounted monitors. On display was the most recent image indicating the massive coronal hole that had formed on the northern hemisphere of the sun.

The space weather forecaster who raised the alarm took off his glasses and walked around the room. He studied the faces of his co-workers.

“Do you think
that
will disappear overnight? Seriously?” he asked sarcastically while pointing toward the monitors.

The sun slowly, almost imperceptibly, rotated on the screen as it fluxed and oscillated. It looked like a gigantic fusion reactor preparing to create a massive release of energy.

The senior scientist broke the silence. “Give me the current forecast—best available estimate.”

The space weather forecasters all turned their attention back to their stations, and the keyboards began to clatter. The monitors changed as each of the forecast models were determined.

“First up, what’s the radio blackout prediction at zero hour,” asked the senior scientist.

“R5, extreme—a complete high-frequency radio blackout on the entire sunlit side of Earth, lasting for hours, if not days. Airline travel will need to be halted, and oceangoing vessels will need to be notified well in advance.”

“Radiation?”

“Yes, sir. Our scale predicts
extreme
as well. An S5 radiation storm is likely. All aircraft passengers will be exposed to radiation at high altitudes. NASA should abort any EVA, extravehicular activity. Many satellites will be rendered useless, in some cases permanently.”

The senior scientist rubbed his temples and walked around the room. He glanced up at the observation auditorium and noticed the schoolkids for the first time. None of them were speaking and the tour guide was staring back at him. He tried not to show any concern and managed a smile as he turned back to his team.

“Call out the G-scale effects.”

“Sir, I’m predicting a geomagnetic storm of the highest level, a G5. We are predicting a massive voltage control failure across all interconnected power grids. Transformers will experience damage resulting in blackouts and, potentially, collapse.”

“ETA?”

“We predict the initial impact in higher latitudes will be felt within twenty hours. At that time, there is the potential for widespread voltage control problems, and some protective systems will mistakenly trip out key assets from the grid. NASA will need to be advised that unavoidable radiation hazards to their astronauts will be experienced. Likewise, passengers in high-flying aircraft may be exposed to radiation. Radio blackouts will become more prevalent.”

“What’s the zero hour?” he asked as he slumped in his chair and prepared to pick up the receiver for the requisite call to Kathryn Sullivan, the Under Secretary of Commerce who acted as the administrator of NOAA.