48 Hours, page 32
And so it went. At least Purdue had power. In the smaller towns, people were just packing it in and moving to where friends or family still had power. Local stores were shuttered. Pharmacies got priority for hookups to portable generators providing enough juice for that corner of the store where you could get medications refilled. No credit cards, cash or check only. Local supermarkets took huge hits, when they ran out of fuel for their emergency generators and everything frozen and refrigerated had to be condemned.
One final memory which was like something straight out of Rod Serling’s classic Twilight Zone episode, “The Monsters are Due on Maple Street.”
Early evening about six or seven days into it and suddenly half a dozen houses across the street lit up.
Think of what just a week or so during a midwest winter without electricity was doing to us.
My side of the street and the surrounding block was still without electricity. Within minutes everybody was out of their homes, pulling on jackets, standing around, asking one another questions the way a crowd will when of course no one really knows the answers. It was just that the lucky few across the street had a functional wire back to a transformer that had just been replaced and was feeding them the precious juice … but not the rest of us.
Someone knocked on a door of one of the blessed ones. “Hey Jim, how come you got power and we don’t?”
“Don’t know, just lucky I guess.”
More people were wandering across the street, standing in the yards of the chosen few with electricity. Someone came trotting up carrying a long coil of that orange colored outdoor wire, asking if he could hook in to an outside plug. “Come on Jim, can’t you share some?” Someone else actually approached with a power strip, like the indoor type your computer is hooked into, suggesting why not just plug that into an outside socket and half a dozen houses could get wired in as well.
I didn’t know Jim, but I could see he was getting nervous. And in that crowd the writer in me could just see Rod Serling standing to one side, in his cool Brooks Brothers suit, cigarette smoke coiling up, and saying “Presented for your consideration, a university town about to turn ugly…”
I just went back home, sat by the front window, watched the circus and finally a cop car actually pulled up. I guess one of the chosen ones with electricity was getting nervous.
Finally, a day or two later, the lights came back on for me. And, yeah, it felt like a miracle. The juice, the ubiquitous juice that runs our lives, had miraculously returned! I could hear the blower for the heater kick on and turned the thermostat up to seventy-six. The fridge, empty of food, hummed back to life. At least the town had the water system up and with that juice just ticking in to my little single-story ranch house the meter was again spinning round. A few hours and it would be hot bath time. Even my freezing cold water bed, (yes, I’m from the ’70s and ’80s) would begin to warm up. Television, is the cable system back up? Damn it no, but I can still get out the rabbit ears, hook them up and get a fuzzy signal from Indianapolis. And OMG, my computer!
Before the power blew off I had the good sense to disconnect everything, in case a surge hit first. I reconnected, took a deep breath and pushed the on button and that screen came back to life!
The notes for what would be my doctoral dissertation, were waiting for me. The next book in my Lost Regiment science fiction series, ready for another chapter … but my first priority? A raid on a German airfield in that glorious game “Secret Weapons of the Luftwaffe,” called for me. So there was the rest of my first evening with the electricity back on. A cold beer that I had stuck into the freezer for an hour, my contented yellow lab curled up by my feet, the house blazing with light, while I tangled with a couple of Me-262s in my computer generated P-51 Mustang. (I won of course, the AI back then was predictable.)
Thus was the great ice storm and power failure of Indiana in the early 1990s. Did anyone die? Yes, a few. The poor guy with a bad heart trying to scrape the ice off his driveway, or cut off downed limbs with a chain saw, the usual idiot or two who did touch downed power lines. Some broken limbs from falling on the ice and that was about it. But mass starvation? Actually freezing to death? Disease from failed sanitation and untreated water? Rioting and civil breakdown?
Nope … but the experience was certainly stored away by this author.
* * *
After grad school I landed a professorship at Montreat College and moved to the wonderful Norman Rockwell–like town of Black Mountain and had been there for eleven years when it was the summer of 2004. A couple of years earlier I teamed up with Newt Gingrich to write a series of historical fictions about the Civil War. On a hot summer day we were scheduled for a meeting to start planning our next novel. Newt had lined up a suite for me in a hotel near where he lived, since his house was getting torn up with remodeling. I got there early, settled in, and waited. He arrived for our meeting a few hours later and it was obvious he was furious about something.
“I’m sick of it. Damn it, when will Congress or anyone wake up about EMP?!” he snapped at the guy accompanying him who at first I assumed was an assistant or something.
“EMP? You mean electromagnetic pulse?” I butted in.
He later said that caught him a bit off guard, at first firing back, “You know about EMP?”
I answered yes, shrugged, commented that I had picked up on it when reading stuff on nuclear war fighting strategy.
We settled down around the suite’s kitchen counter, and was introduced to the gentleman with him, Bill Sanders. Not an assistant, Bill was a lieutenant commander in the navy who was considered a top theorist on nuclear warfare strategy and technology. Bill would eventually go on to write the technical afterword for One Second After.
I then got the rundown on what had happened. Earlier in the day a Congressional study group had released their report, about the threat to America sustaining a deathblow from an EMP strike.
The terrible irony of that day. Some idiot had scheduled the report and open hearing for its release to be scheduled on the same day as the long-anticipated report by Congress about the attack on 9/11. Result, not one media source showed up for the EMP report. It was like the tree falling in the forest routine, or whatever television show gets scheduled opposite the Super Bowl. We talked late into the evening, the three of us going over copies of the report.
It was a long drive home the following day. We never did get around to talking about our next Civil War novel. Instead, Newt challenged me to write a book about EMP. Maybe what was needed was a novel that could raise public awareness and eventually help create political action and preparedness.
That challenge was a life-changing moment.
Once home I carefully studied the report, the declassified section about a hundred pages or so. After finishing the Congressional report, like any historian trained to do research, I started to dig into the addendums, tracked down technical reports cited in footnotes, which led me to more obscure articles with yet more footnotes.
What did I learn? The report, the analysis of how our high-tech society would break apart within hours if the nation’s power grid went down from an enemy attack was accurate. The most chilling statistic: the casualty rate.
No electricity means a total breakdown: no water, sanitation, nursing homes become hellholes, disease runs rampant, loss of heating and cooling, safe food and medication distribution go down, the list is numbing … it becomes a cascading nightmare, along with the breakdown of social order. Conclusion: upward of 90 percent of all Americans would die within a year. The greatest disaster in the history of humanity that would transcend the two world wars, and even the great plague of the fourteenth century.
I had to take the challenge. I had to write a book that would help raise public awareness, but how?
* * *
A long frustrating year followed. A story line was just not coming together. I started to fall into what I came to call the “Jack Ryan trap.” Yeah, we have our hero, bad guys have three nukes, get them close to the continental United States on a shipping container boat or maybe a North Korean sub. Our hero races to spread the warning, even stops a couple of them and then … and then? The story line sucked. I knew it and I was dead-ended.
A frustrating, long winter and spring followed of absolute writer’s block and it would just not come together. It can be a near insanity triggering experience for anyone striving for a creative project. You almost catch glimpses of it at times, like the movement of a shadow you thought you saw in the corner of the room. But it just won’t come, that golden moment, that instant in time when it suddenly falls into a sublime pattern, that true “OMG” moment.
Winter slipped into spring with no idea what I was going to do.
I am blessed to live up in the Smoky Mountains. My college, tucked into a narrow valley below Mount Mitchell, is such a beautiful, unique community. We average about five hundred full-time students. It is a small tight-knit community. From my first days as a teacher, at a small boarding school in Maine, I’ve always believed that teaching is about far more than the fifty minutes a day in a classroom. It is all that surrounds that time: the chance meetings in a hallway, who you sit down with at lunch, noticing a student that just seems down and since you know their name you go over to them to have a chat and find out what’s going on. Those are the real moments of teaching and learning and often building lifelong friendships.
Graduation day therefore is a day of some mixed emotions. Sure, the professor side is there, that after a few hours of sweating in one’s ceremonial robes it was out the door, head for home, and three months of freedom!
But there always was another side. At our college all the professors sit up on the stage. From that vantage point you see not just happy families and friends, you see the students in their robes, ready to take the big step. After four years you know every last one of them and at times it does leave a lump in the throat. More than a few had become “my kids,” and on this day they are leaving, and chances are that for many I’ll never see them again. Memory of them will eventually blur into the memories of several thousand students that have passed through my life since I first taught a high school class back in 1978.
The day was hot, actually downright sweltering and that vast octagonal-shaped assembly hall had no A/C. The robes you get to wear as a prof might look cool, but believe me, they turn into sweatboxes when it is ninety degrees. There was the usual procession to start, a couple of hymns and prayers since we are a Christian college and can do such things. Introductions and then finally, the graduation speaker.
Does anyone actually remember who spoke at their graduation and what they said? I’ve sat through dozens and frankly cannot remember a single one, except this one, on that particular day.
I’ve always said that a great graduation speaker, when stepping up to the podium, should pull out an old-fashioned egg timer, hold it up, announce he was setting it at ten minutes, and when it started to ring he’d shut up and sit down. Whoever does that will get a standing ovation not just at the end, but at the start as well!
On that particular day I knew such would not be the fate of anyone in that sweltering room. Within five minutes the speaker, clutching the podium, was just beginning to warm up to his subject while two thousand in that room were sweating and already silently begging for mercy. Five minutes went to ten, ten to twenty, and it was obvious he was nowhere near finished.
About thirty minutes in I leaned over to a professor next to me, a darn good friend and whispered, “how about you fake fainting and I’ll carry you out.” I was dead serious and she later said if he had gone on for another ten minutes she would have fainted for real.
So there I am sitting, no longer listening, the speech just a drone of noise, soaked in sweat … and gazing out at the audience, watching “my kids” and how they were reacting.
At that moment, it was as if Jean Shepherd were sitting behind me, and whispered “Kid, write what you know.”
* * *
The story that would become One Second After formed within me at that instant and it did indeed seem like but an instant in time.
At that moment what did I know? I knew those kids, I knew more than a few of their families. I saw and knew neighbors, friends, a beloved elderly couple, kids who had graduated several years earlier, married and were back with their newborn baby. I saw an old honored friend, an Omaha Beach vet, and had just gone there with him the year before. They, us, our town, my town. That is what I know.
And in that knowing a deep sadness swept into me as well. What would happen to us, to all of us, to these people I love, if the lights went out and in one second the America we knew ceased to exist?
Jean’s advice came home to me at last. I will write about “us.”
* * *
If you’ve read my John Matherson series you might have learned that where the story is set in North Carolina, the village of Black Mountain and Montreat College, they are real.
I wrote a book about what I knew, which is simply about us. Along the way I interviewed dozens, from my friend the chief of police, to the pharmacist who actually broke down in tears as we thought out the questions. Doctors, my UPS driver, my auto mechanic and my neighbor, a buddy who can darn near build or fix anything. “What would you do if the power turned off and never came back on?” My father had passed away only months before I started to write the book. I went back to his nursing home, interviewed the director and the nurses, all of whom I saw as guardian angels and asked “What would happen here if the power went down and the emergency generator shorted off as well?” If you’ve read One Second After you know how that particular interview inspired a scene that was painful to write.
As mentioned early on, Frank’s Alas, Babylon, was in my thoughts and with respect for him I’ll say again that I saw my book as taking a concept and moving it into the real-world threats of the twenty-first century.
The book finally came out several years later, hit the New York Times Best Seller List, two more would follow, and now this book, 48 Hours.
I know more than a few might be asking now, “Hey wait a minute, 48 Hours is a whole different story, it’s not even about EMP, so why this essay?”
I was completely unaware of the issue of how solar storms can effect our electrical grid until a few weeks after One Second After came out. A friend called me up to congratulate me and then asked if I had ever read a book called The Sun Kings. It was about the early days of solar astronomy and how the astronomer Richard Carrington first connected solar storms to the impact, several days later, on the electrical infrastructure of 1859, the spreading web of telegraph lines. Across parts of northern Europe, England, and the United States, systems shorted out, wires even caught on fire and melted off the poles.
I read the book, and there was another OMG moment that infrastructure security was not just about EMP but about something else, coronal mass ejection (CME), as well. That stayed with me and finally would lead to this book.
Has what I have written had an influence on things? Some say I was the trigger point for the sudden emergence of the “prepper movement.” I’ll step back from that; there were a heck of a lot of others writing about the subject and my book just seemed to hit at a moment when it could be most helpful (even if after nearly fifteen years there still has been no federal-level action to harden our nation’s infrastructure against such an event).
A couple of years back my publisher asked me to write a book about CME. I finally agreed and thus started over a year of staring at the ceiling at one in the morning, getting really good at beating my computer at level-eight chess, and going nowhere fast. Whatever I tried seemed derivative of the past, what I had already written. The only difference being there’d be about forty-eight hours warning that the grid was about to go down, but then where’s the story? The usual running around by some characters, our heroes getting ready, the cadres of bureaucrats screwing things up, we already know that would happen and I felt, sure I could write it, but in a big way it would be a cop-out. A serving up of just another helping of what I had already done before with my Matherson books.
And then there came that moment yet again, that OMG moment. I was in a greenroom, ready to tape a television interview out in Springfield, Missouri, and chatting with a close friend of mine. I told her my lament of yet another bad dose of writer’s block, she made one simple comment and the entire story hit me in that instant. A day later I was back home, at the computer, and writing.
48 Hours presents a moral question, a true “what would you do if…” Dare I say maybe it presents the ultimate question to all of us if a solar event more powerful than a CME ignited, and humanity, or at least 99 percent of humanity, knew it could be facing the end of their world in the next forty-eight hours.
I wrote it in part out of frustration as well. I believe in America, I believe that as Abraham Lincoln once said we are indeed “the last best hope of earth.” But of late how we all seem to have turned on each other is heartbreaking. Being left or right, liberal or conservative, believer in God or not (at least as you believe in God) is tearing us apart as a nation. So thus a question: If 48 Hours ever did become a reality, what would we do; what would you do? Maybe at such a moment we would see that which separates us has become all but meaningless and that all of humanity has far more in common than whatever divides us.
I wrote 48 Hours with a belief, a hope that this is something “I know,” that at least some of us, would indeed reveal, as Lincoln once said, “the better angels of our nature.”
William R. Forstchen
July 2018
