What most people don't understand is that the electromagnetic pulse of a solar flare is in itself not all that destructive. The Earth has been hit many times in the centuries that man has been around. in the past about all that it caused was some wild looking night sky as the aurora effect caused by it would be seen in places where they were not normally visible.
The problem with it now has to do with the way we make electricity. All a generator is is a bunch of wire run in and out of a magnetic field over and over. In the past there wasn't much wire just hanging around. In the mid-1800s we got hit by a big pulse and that was the first time it did more than making funny looking night skies. The pulse passing across hundreds of miles of telegraph wires generated a big electrical surge that zapped some telegraph operators and caused a bunch of fires. The amount of power generated has to do with the length of the wire and the strength of the magnetic field. A generator will have hundreds of wire wrapped around an axel and then it is spun through a magnetic field. How many millions of miles of wire do we have hanging on poles just in the US? If you hit that wire with a STRONG magnetic field the amount of voltage generated would be MASSIVE. This level of power surge would blow all the transformers right off the poles. It would meltdown most of our generation plants when a surge many times stronger than what that plant puts out runs back into it.
There would be fires all over the place and with the electric systems down all over the country and the communication lines gone it would be total chaos. If the surge was powerful enough our homes which are wooden boxes wrapped in wire might burn down like a place struck by lightning. Modern autos and trucks have miles of wire in them and then they are run by tiny computers that have hair-fine wires in them. It isn't that the basic motor and system is damaged, it is the delicate computer control systems that run the system with be fried. Old school cars and trucks with none of the computer stuff would probably survive but anything much less than 40 years old would not make it.
If the entire system went down it would take, best case scenario, 5 years to get us back to 1950 level power and complexity. You have to understand, the place that makes the things that we will need are gone, and the things that we need to fix them come from places that also are gone. A year later 90% of the people will be dead. Starvation, disease, and the COLD are deadly without our modern systems. Places like NYC have enough food to feed its people for THREE DAYS on average and they are dependent on constant shipments that will STOP. If this were to happen in the dead of winter I figure that fires would kill more people than the cold. Modern homes are not made to be heated with an open fire!!!
Where I was raised and kive we have been hit by a lot of Hurricanes and had the power go down for as long as two weeks. losing power for a few days has happened a lot of times. I was amazed that many people were in trouble within a couple of days. they opened up places where you could get bottled water, MREs and a bag of ice and the lines were miles long!!!! I live out in the woods and we don't get taken care of very fast when there is a lot of people without power. We are always ready and in general, have a pretty good time when the power goes down. We are ALWAYS prepared to go a few weeks without power. We have food for several months and live in a place where I can hunt and fish to stretch that out indefinitely. I am among the odd though and am much more aware of what we will need so for people like us no power wouldn't be as urgent of a problem.
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