Are You Ready For 10 Years With No Power Grid? Massive Solar Flare Could Cause Decade-Long Blackout

(NaturalNews) One morning in September, 1859, British astronomer Richard Carrington sat in his private observatory, drawing pictures of sunspots using a telescope which projected an image of the sun onto a screen.

As he drew and observed, there suddenly appeared a brilliant flash of white light on the surface of the sun. Startled, he ran to find witnesses to what he realized was a very unusual event, but by the time he returned, the massive solar flare that Carrington observed had mostly dissipated.

The next morning, shortly before dawn, skies around the globe lit up with colorful auroras so bright that “newspapers could be read as easily as in daylight,” as NASA describes the event.

In those days, of course, there was no electrical “grid” as we now have, but there were telegraph networks in various parts the world.

From the NASA website:

[T]elegraph systems worldwide went haywire. Spark discharges shocked telegraph operators and set the telegraph paper on fire. Even when telegraphers disconnected the batteries powering the lines, aurora-induced electric currents in the wires still allowed messages to be transmitted.

If a solar flare of such magnitude hit the earth now with a gigantic burst of charged particles — and scientist say it is a matter of “when,” not “if” — our electrical grid would almost certainly be disabled, if not completely destroyed.

The scary truth is that experts believe that it could take years — possibly up to a decade — to repair the system.

From a report posted by Bloomberg Business:

A disturbance of the magnitude of the 1859 Carrington Event, which caused the failure of telegraph systems in North America and Europe, could cost $1 trillion to $2 trillion in the first year and take four to 10 years to recover from, according to a National Research Council report.

In February of this year, the Deep Space Climate Observatory (DSCOVR) was launched and soon will be in position to begin observing the sun from its orbit between the earth and the sun. The observatory will be used as part of a system created by the U.S. Space Weather Prediction Center to warn “power companies, airlines and other susceptible industries about potentially adverse conditions.”