Space Weather Threat

For John, BLUF:  The question is, who funds this?  The Power Companies or the People collectively (i.e.; the Government)?  Nothing to see here; just move along.

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Rocks Under I-95 Present Odd, and Scary, Threat to Power Grid

From Bloomberg Quint, by Reporter Brian K. Sullivan, 13 June 2018.

Here are the basics:

Here’s something you probably didn’t know you needed to worry about:  There’s a layer of 300 million-year-old rock under Interstate 95 that’s capable of killing the lights from Washington to Boston and beyond the next time the sun erupts in all its fury.

Sound far-fetched? Perhaps.  But not to scientists.  A solar storm is now viewed as enough of a risk in fact that grid operators across North America are working on plans to respond to just such a disturbance.  And a draft of a soon-to-be-published U.S. Geological Survey report pinpoints the Eastern Seaboard as one of the areas most in danger.

That’s because this Paleozoic-era rock doesn’t let the energy from a major geomagnetic storm — a once-in-a-100-years kind of event — pass through it but instead acts as a backstop that sends the surge back up above the ground for a second shot at causing mayhem.

“It’s an active problem that a lot of people are trying to solve and understand,” said Christopher Balch, space scientist at the Space Weather Prediction Center in Boulder, Colorado.

Through a stroke of bad luck, the worst of these rocks basically traces the path of I-95 from Richmond, Virginia, to Portland, Maine, passing through Washington, New York and Boston along the way.

Qu

Hat tip to the InstaPundit.

Regards  —  Cliff