“Solar storms, physical attack, and cyber-attack have already caused blackouts … For these high-consequence threats … the electric grid and interdependent infrastructures are vulnerable.”
— Resilient Societies Risk Assessment Reporti
Americans living at the start of the 20th century possessed far greater self-reliance than those born at the start of the 21st century. In the year 1900, nearly two-thirds of the estimated 76M+ U.S. population lived in rural areas, most on farms. Daily life required hard physical labor and practical skills that were essential to survival: growing and preserving food, repairing tools, managing livestock, and improvising solutions with limited resources. Self-reliance was not a virtue; it was a necessity. Larger families were needed, and they lived together or near one another, which reinforced these skills. Practical knowledge, a strong work ethic, and survival practices were passed directly from one generation to the next. Communities were tight-knit, interdependent, and resilient because they had to be.
Over the next century, however, America underwent a profound transformation. In the year 2000, nearly 80 percent of the estimated 280M+ U.S. population lived in urban or suburban environments. Society shifted away from agrarian self-sufficiency toward an economy dominated by information, services, and consumer convenience. As infrastructure expanded and became more technologically interdependent, practical survival skills steadily eroded. Nowhere is this decline more evident than in our dependence on critical infrastructure sectors such as food and agriculture, transportation systems, energy (electricity in particular), communications, and water and wastewater systems. These five highly interdependent sectors will be discussed briefly to illustrate how unprepared Americans are in the isolation of an electrical grid down scenario.
Food and Agriculture
In 1900, most households possessed the skills and tools to feed themselves. Growing food and its preservation—canning, smoking, drying, salting—was routine. When families lacked something, they bartered goods or labor within their community. Food production was local, personal, and resilient. Over the 20th century, mechanization and industrial farming dramatically increased food output while requiring fewer farmers. This efficiency gave rise to today’s centralized food and agriculture regions and farms, which are extraordinarily productive. Most Americans don’t even have a garden and even fewer would know how to butcher animals for meat. Americans today fail to even appreciate the logistics to stock grocery stores and even fewer realize that their modern grocery stores typically hold only a few days’ worth of food. In a prolonged electrical grid down scenario—where refrigeration, transportation, and logistics fail—food hoarding, looting, food scarcity would occur quickly, catching most Americans unprepared.
Transportation
In 1900, transportation was limited. Most people traveled locally by foot, horse, and wagon, often on unimproved roads that became muddy and nearly impassable at certain times of the year. Longer distance travel was confined to rail, ship, or river boat within the U.S. This reduced mobility in rural areas fostered local cohesion where people lived closer to their work, families, and sources of sustenance. Today, American life depends on a vast and complex transportation network. Cars, airplanes, high-speed rail, subways, and trucks enable unprecedented mobility and convenience. Supply chains span continents, delivering goods directly to our doors in astonishing speed. Yet this efficiency and convenience come at a cost: Americans are now physically and psychologically disconnected from the systems that sustain them, most don’t know their neighbors or care too, and family members live further apart, often states away. When transportation networks fail, daily life quickly grinds to a halt, and the goods and services that we depend on or travel to become out of reach.
Energy (Electricity)
In 1900, electricity was largely confined to urban centers. Rural Americans relied on candles, kerosene lanterns, and open-hearth fires well into the 1930s for lighting and heat. Early electrical systems operated at varying voltages and frequencies due to the proximity of generation and consumption. As communities grew and these isolated generation and consumption grids came together forcing a 60 Hz frequency standard of electrical generation which enabled interconnectedness forming our modern electrical grid. Today, electricity underpins all 16 U.S. critical infrastructure sectors. Without it, large farm production degrades; frozen and refrigerated food spoils; communications and logistical scheduling systems fail; water and wastewater systems stop flowing; fuel production and pumping ceases; shipping and transportation falter; emergency response and critical medical care is hampered; and the economy declines as greater chaos ensues. Americans are spoiled by a high functioning modern society and are profoundly unprepared today for life without electricity, even temporarily. Of all infrastructure sectors, electricity is the central hub upon which all other critical infrastructure sectors depend and when it fails, everything else soon follows.
Communications
At the turn of the 20th century, long-distance communication was slow and deliberate. Telegraphs, early telephones, and postal mail were the primary means of long-distance communication. A long-distance phone call just 50 years ago was a family event with a preliminary letter mailed earlier to coordinate both parties of the time and day, and the call often occurred later at night to reduce costs. Over time, communication technologies evolved mainly due to deregulation in the early 1980s, which drove competitiveness and innovation. Our communication systems evolved from telegraph wires to telephone wires of solid copper, to twisted multipair lines, to fiber optic lines, to microwave, to wireless, and even satellites. Today, instant global communication is ubiquitous, and this communication infrastructure is vital to our financial systems. In many homes, cellular phones have replaced landline phones, and constant local, regional, and global connectivity is assumed and expected no matter the time of day or night. Few Americans consider how dependent these systems are on electricity, or how quickly society would become isolated and impotent without them in an electrical grid-down environment, where few know their neighbors or have skills or resources to immediately start coping with the new normal.
Water and Wastewater
In 1900, rural Americans pulled drinking water from wells, springs, or streams, and disposed of waste through outhouses or natural waterways—the latter often causing public health concerns. Over the century, municipal potable water treatment and wastewater systems evolved and expanded, dramatically improving sanitation and reducing disease outbreaks. Today, clean water flows effortlessly into our homes and businesses under pressure, and waste disappears with the turn of a handle, and we take it all for granted. In an electrical grid-down scenario, potable water and water pressure will be compromised. Most Americans have only a vague understanding of how to purify water or safely manage waste without modern systems—skills that were once commonplace and helped ensure the population’s health from debilitating water-borne disease.
A Fragile Civilization
Self-reliance in 1900 was essential. In contrast, modern Americans today—largely urbanized and infrastructure-dependent—possess few of the skills needed today to survive a prolonged electrical grid down scenario. Today, Americans live under the illusion that a local, regional, or broader grid-down scenario will not occur, and if it does occur, it will be promptly fixed. However, we currently live under known and growing threats of devastating solar storms, adversarial countries with nuclear ballistic missile capabilities, and state and non-state actors seeking to cyberattack key infrastructure sectors.
Solar Storms: History provides a warning which few are even aware of today. In 1859, the Carrington Event—a massive solar storm—caused auroras as far south as the Caribbean and induced powerful electrical currents in telegraph wires. Telegraph equipment and offices caught fire, operators were shocked, and systems operated without batteries. Today, Earth is crisscrossed with electrical transmission lines, steel rail lines, metal pipelines, and metal communication cables that serve as vast “long-lead antennas” capable of collecting and transmitting the ground-induced currents. These currents are caused by the solar storm compressing Earth’s magnetosphere resulting in fluctuation of magnetic field lines around the earth from pole-to-pole. A solar storm of similar magnitude to 1859 could collapse the electrical power grid and statistically the Earth is long overdue for a sizable event to squarely hit the Earth. The difference today versus 1859 is that, in the U.S., we live in a modern society with highly interdependent critical infrastructure sectors all requiring electricity to operate. Since the Earth spins as it passes through such a solar storm, the damage and degradation to electrical power grids becomes a global event.
Nuclear Electromagnetic Pulse (EMP): In addition to natural threats, adversarial nations could detonate a nuclear weapon in space, generating an EMP capable of disabling electronics over large regions. The higher the altitude of nuclear detonation, the greater line-of-sight range of EMP energy that can degrade or destroy electronics. The energy from an EMP can arch across and burn out solid-state electronics of chips and circuit boards. These electrical devices define every aspect of our daily life in modern society. Such an event could also degrade and destroy high-voltage transformers and ancillary equipment vital to transmit electricity.
Cyberattacks: Coordinated state or non-state cyberattacks, possibly blended with physical attacks, can cause local and regional electrical grid down scenarios over prolonged periods of time. It’s well established that peer adversaries like China have mapped and even likely installed virtual logic triggers within our electrical grid systems to be activated at a time of their choosing. Restarting a local or regional electrical grid from a cold “black start” is challenging.
The Illusion of Rescue
Modern Americans often assume that government assistance will arrive immediately after such an event. Yet historically, the 20th and 21st century have shown that even localized disasters overwhelm response capabilities. An electrical-power grid failure caused by a solar storm or EMP would be multi-regional or global in scale depending on the severity. No government could respond effectively or rapidly enough to meet the needs of the estimated 345M+ U.S. population today, or even a small percentage of that total. A prolonged regional or broader electrical grid-down scenario, caused by any of these threats, will result in social unrest, and those we turn too—firefighters, paramedics, police officers, and other social services—may be unreachable and likely unresponsive due to high absenteeism and the large scope of the disaster.
A Call for a New Era of Preparedness
America urgently needs a renewed focus on preparedness and self-reliance skills, akin to the Civil Defense efforts of the 1950s. Citizens of all ages should know basic survival skills: building a temporary shelter, keeping warm, making fire, purifying water, managing waste, knowing medical home remedies, growing and preserving food, basic animal husbandry, self-protection, using a compass and map, and community cooperation.
At a minimum, Americans, if possible, should purchase and maintain two weeks to two months of non-perishable food, critical medications, clean drinking water, means of self-protection, and contingency plans for extended electrical grid-down outages for each member of the household. Communities and neighbors should also plan to support their most vulnerable members to the greatest extent possible.
One conclusion is unavoidable: statistically, Americans are likely to experience a significant regional or broader electrical grid-down scenario within the next decade which may last days, weeks, or months. When it happens, government assistance will be limited or nonexistent. Resources will become limited, and tensions will bloom between the have and have-nots. Living through such a period will depend not on technology, but on preparedness, basic skills, adaptability, and self-reliance. An interesting irony is that less technologically dependent societies may adapt more easily than modern ones to this new normal.
The author is responsible for the content of this article. The views expressed do not reflect the official policy or position of the National Intelligence University, the Office of the Director of National Intelligence, the U.S. Intelligence Community, or the U.S. Government.
i As referenced on December 19, 2025 on https://www.resilientsocieties.org/threats.html
