America was dealt a grim warning from an unlikely source on Saturday: There is a “100% probability” that the nation’s power grid will be wiped out, knocking us back to “the Stone Age” — an event few in the United States will be able to survive.
Now, when you think of actor Dennis Quaid, “power grids” probably aren’t the first thing that springs to mind. Quaid, a GenX icon, has starred in roughly 150 movies, and most folks are likely to think about flicks like Innerspace, D.O.A., or The Day After Tomorrow.
But Quaid has a new project called Grid Down, Power Up, and it’s enough to keep you up at night.
“Grid failure is a real and imminent threat, a devastatingly deadly occurrence leading to life-threatening shortages of heat, food, and water,” according to the documentary’s website. “If protective measures are not taken, we will experience catastrophic failures leaving citizens in states of starvation, death, destruction, and darkness for months.”
(Video: YouTube)
Quaid joined Tucker Carlson to shed light on a serious issue that could leave us all in the dark.
“Basically, there is a 100% probability that our sun — generating what they call a GMD, which is a solar storm that hits hard — hits our Earth and the magnetic field that we have around the Earth and can fry everything that is electric above the ground, including our entire grid,” the actor told Carlson.
This isn’t the dystopian dream of some sci-fi writer. It’s happened before, in what was described as a “100-year event.”
“They call it a ‘Carrington event,’ which happened in, I think it was 1859,” Quaid explained. “And at that time, basically we had telegraph lines as far as electricity goes, and it fried our entire telegraph system. It was set up, had to be replaced and–”
“The entire thing?” Carlson interjected.
“The entire thing,” Quaid confirmed. “And so imagine what that would do now with a very large storm, which there’s a 100% chance of it happening.”
Ep. 64 At some point America’s power grid will fail. What happens then? Dennis Quaid on a risk the government seems to be ignoring. pic.twitter.com/EzX2e4NfU2
— Tucker Carlson (@TuckerCarlson) January 13, 2024
In today’s world, the effect of such an event would be nothing short of catastrophic, with some studies predicting that, within a year, “90% of the population would be dead.”
“It would take out not only the electricity, but, you know, all of our entire infrastructure and our society runs our electricity,” Quaid said. “We don’t know how to live without it. … There would be [no] water in your tap there, you couldn’t get gas for your car because the whole system is broken down. Everything that we rely upon would be gone. The food would melt in our refrigerators. There would be — and they predict within a year about 90% of the population would be dead from starvation, disease or, you know, people. And it gets back to the Stone Age again.”
It would take “trillions of dollars” to replace the system and get the United States back on its feet again.
“Nobody’s really talking about it,” Quaid said. “And, in fact, President Trump actually, signed an executive order to, harden our grid to protect ourselves against an event like this happening. Obama, tried to get that going as well.”
Regulatory agencies and lobbyists balk at the idea of spending the money to protect against the possibility of a sunstorm.
“Most of our grid power companies are privately owned, and you can understand them not wanting to spend money on something that might occur,” Quaid explained. “But this is definitely going to occur.”
And the sun isn’t the only thing that can bring this kind of chaos down on America.
A single nuclear device, loaded onto a Scud missile on a cargo ship and exploded in space over the nation would produce what is called “super EMP” — or, electromagnetic pulse. It would have the same nation-ending effect as a GMD, Quaid said, and we wouldn’t even know how to retaliate.
“Because there are so many actors doing this and, you know, some of their terrorist subgroups as well, who do you retaliate against?” the actor asked. “If it’s if it’s done from a cargo ship and you don’t even know where it came from, so who was it? Who was the perpetrator? And who do you retaliate against?”
“And, yes, the military has hardened most of their infrastructure when it comes to this,” he noted. “But they get their electricity… 99% of their electricity comes from civilian infrastructure. So how long is that going to last?”
According to Quaid, “the Russians and the Chinese have done so much more to harden and to protect their infrastructure than we have.”
To protect American interests, we would need to install protective relays and transformers, and Quaid admits that would require a monumental effort on the part of our government.
“We have the technology. We know how to do this,” he stressed. “It’s not something mysterious that we have to get involved in.”
It would take, he reasoned, something on the scale of the infamous Manhattan Project “to cut through all the bureaucratic, red tape and be vested with the authority to just to get this done.”
“We could do it,” Quaid stated. “We could do it in a couple of years.”
Writers and editors can be contacted at [email protected] with feedback, tips, or corrections.
Melissa Fine is the former executive editor of Casino Player, Strictly Slots, and Poker
Digest magazines. She is a UCLA graduate, news junkie, and dedicated Stargate SG-
1 fan. Melissa currently lives with her dog and two cats in a tiny town in the Sierra
Nevada foothills.
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