Privacy   |    Financial   |    Current Events   |    Self Defense   |    Miscellaneous   |    Letters To Editor   |    About Off The Grid News   |    Off The Grid Videos   |    Weekly Radio Show

Is Your Time Machine Ready? – Episode 031

logoIt’s not a matter of “if”… it’s a matter of “when”. Either because of economic factors or a solar storm, the power grid is coming down.

Where will you be when that happens?

[powerpress]

Off The Grid Radio
Ep 031
Released: January 14, 2011

Bill: And welcome everybody, it’s Bill Heid with you today. We’d like to thank you for taking some time and spending it with us. Our guest today is John Kappenman. John’s been with us before and I was telling John before we went on that the podcast we did with him is probably the most listened to podcast we’ve ever done, about solar storms and the effect of solar storms. So we’re very excited to talk a little bit again. We’ll just review a little again about what the nature of the problem is and then we’ll go into with respect to where we are going down the line with this solar storm problem. John’s the owner and principal consultant for Storm Analysis Consultants. His resume is a full webpage long. I won’t read the whole thing. I think he’s the go-to guy on this subject. He’s testified in front of a lot of important people – FEMA, Homeland Security, the Senate. John, welcome again.

John: Thank you, Bill.

Bill: It’s great to have you with us. What I thought, we’ve got – as I had mentioned, we’ve pretty much doubled our listenership since the last time we’ve talked. This is an issue that still gets play. I read a story just yesterday about solar storms. There was a big one in the United Kingdom – a big article in late December. Can we retrace and go back through, and talk a little bit about solar storms, solar flares, sun cycles and give us a little background on the history of this thing? Then we’ll update everybody.

John: Sure. In regard to solar activity, I would guess that many people are somewhat familiar with the sunspot cycle. This is a variation that occurs in the behavior of the sun. Sunspot cycle is nothing more than a period of increasing and decreasing sunspot observations on the surface of the sun. The typical sunspot cycle lasts about 11 years. We’re in the cycle 24 – the ascending part of cycle 24 – we just started going up a few years ago after coming off of a very quiet minimum, between cycle 23 and 24. The outlook for this solar cycle is that we aren’t expecting it to be a large solar cycle. The largest that we know of is cycle 19 that occurred in the late 1950s, early 1960s. We expect this solar cycle to probably be about half as large as cycle 19. That being said, the smaller the solar cycle, usually means lower numbers of storms. It does not, however, tell us much about the intensity of storms. In fact, if we look at where big storms have occurred, it seems that they can occur during major sunspot cycles as well as during rather quiet sunspot cycles. In fact, one of the largest storms that we know of on record, it’s called the Carrington event – named after and English scientist, Carrington, who was the first to make the observation of a big flare event and the subsequent geomagnetic storm that occurred. This storm occurred in 1859 and occurred during a solar cycle that we think will look very much like what we’re about to experience over the next decade or so. We know we have had problems with technology systems from previous large geomagnetic storms, large solar activity events. The bad news is our technology systems have been growing more and more vulnerable to all of these threats from nature – solar activity and geomagnetic storms. For example, power grids didn’t exist back during the Carrington event in 1859. Largely also did not exist during a major storm that occurred in 1921.

Bill: John, in 1859, how did this affect – for our new listeners that hadn’t heard your first interview with us – how did that likely affect the average day of the average guy in the street?

John: Probably very little. The only major electrotechnology system that existed back in 1859 was the telegraph system. That was heavily impacted. In some cases, some of those telegraph systems actually burned down due to effects caused by the storm. As a society, we were not heavily dependent upon electrotechnologies for a lot of the necessities of life back then. We were quite self-sufficient. I guess we all lived off the grid, so-to-speak, back then. As we have evolved our society, now we have a great deal of dependence on continuity of the power grid. Even in your own homes today, you’ll find that you’re probably dependent on phones that are plugged into the power grid for wireless handsets and so forth. Your heating system, even if it’s fired by natural gas, still requires electricity to be available to that furnace in order to facilitate the controls to turn on and off that furnace and so forth. Even in that situation, where we don’t think we’re dependent on electric power, we absolutely are in many cases.

Bill: It seems like, John, every subsequent generation seems to rely on more and more, so we rest on these platforms and then we forget about them, don’t we? They’re as if they’re operating like DOS in the background of a computer – you don’t know they’re there, but if you take it away, you really impact people’s lives in a way that they could really … I think part of the problem NASA is having, if I’m reading their literature correctly – and they don’t say this explicitly, and this isn’t maybe true of our listeners – but the problem that NASA has explaining the story you’re giving us is that the US public is somewhat dumbed down and they have a hard time bridging the intellect to even explain it to people.

John: Well, that might be in part true, but what is also true is that probably the pace of new technologies permeating into society has picked up as well. For example, in the start of the last solar cycle, cycle 23, which began in the late 1990s, that was the first solar cycle that we experienced where a large part of society was now using and adopting cell phones for telecommunications. Over the course of that cycle, we learned that large flare events, which emit noise at radio frequency levels, could potentially impact cell towers and cause phone dropouts and communication problems in that way. We also learned during the last solar cycle that GPS signals can be overwhelmed at times by the radio frequency interference from solar flares. So if anything, we’re continuing to adopt as a society these new technology systems while also being exposed to increasing impacts from the space weather threat that is often not understood when these technology systems are first introduced and widely spread through the system. We have this problem of a continually creeping and increasing pace of creeping problems and dependencies that will occur when these systems are impacted.

Bill: And then what we end up with is a domino-like effect when – if someone knocks some of these things out, we don’t really realize all the things that are operating beneath the surface. We’ll be back. We’re going to take a short break here. Join us. We’ll be back with John Kappenman and we’re going to continue to talk about solar flares and solar storms and their effect. We’ll be right back.

[0:10:53 – 0:15:07 break]

Bill: We are back. It’s Bill Heid here today, and I’ve got special guest John Kappenman with me. We’re talking about the grid. We’re talking about the vulnerability of the grid and what we can maybe expect – possibly what we could expect with the effect of a solar storm. John, we were just about talking creeping technology and the things that are happening. Let’s start to drill down a little bit more to the heart of it too. What about the transformers? The last time we talked, I think one of the most intriguing aspects of this was the transformer issue of the grid itself.

John: Yes. What the analysis that we’ve carried out on the US power grid, for some of these storms – these severe storms that have occurred before, will occur again, but have not yet occurred on today’s far different infrastructure, indicates that they have the potential to cause permanent damage and loss of a significant amount of large, high voltage transformers in the grid. It would be somewhat equivalent to the power grid – as an analogy of your transportation system, of shutting down every major interstate across the US. That would bring to a standstill a lot of ability to function as a society, from a transportation standpoint. Electric power shutdown would be even more significant because it goes down to each and every home, ultimately. If you shut down the high voltage grid, the cascading of the shutdown would extend down all the way to the end users of electricity across those impacted areas. The nature of this threat is also that it has a large geographic footprint. This is something that truly could occur on a planetary scale. Not only are we talking about impacts to the power grid across the North American continent, but it could impact other developed power grids, developed countries around the world.

Bill: So is this – as it affects the actual grid itself, tell us, how does it knock it out? I think that’s where the dots need to be connected, John, where people really don’t – they see this as an abstraction. What’s likely to be the chain of events if something like this happens? What hits and then what happens next and what happens next …?

John: When you have a big solar flare and coronal mass ejection from the sun, it sends out particles from the sun itself into interplanetary space. If that happens to be aimed in the right direction, right towards earth, the earth’s magnetic field will interact and capture a lot of these particles. These particles are heated up ions of helium and hydrogen from the sun itself. The earth’s magnetic field can capture those ions and then that sets up what we call a geomagnetic storm, or sudden rapid fluctuations in the earth’s magnetic field. When you get fluctuations in the earth’s magnetic field, it induces stray currents that flow in modern day technology systems, especially the widespread modern day technology systems like power lines, power grids, undersea communication cables and so forth. These currents are not normally on that infrastructure and when they start flowing through, especially transformers on the power grid, these can damage those transformers. It would be transformers that are exposed to the highest levels of these induced currents from a geomagnetic storm that would be the most at risk of being permanently damaged. In today’s world manufacturing marketplace, we really don’t have the ability to manufacture and replace large numbers of damaged transformers. We’re looking at, in the case of the US alone, something that could take four to 10 years to recover from, based on the amount of transformers that we think could be manufactured and made available to us. And that might be a bit rosy because it assumes that somewhere a manufacturer will be unaffected by that storm and be able to begin manufacturing in a normal fashion. Under this sort of planetary event, I assume that we are probably making a rosy assumption that anybody would be able to resume any kind of normal functioning from a manufacturing standpoint.

Bill: Also, the assumption, John, that would be that, as you said, this is geographically not just targeted at any specific place but could hit a wide region, including many other countries. Some of those countries could be the countries that we would rely on primarily to help us rebuild this infrastructure. Are there 300 of these main key, high voltage transformers?

John: Yes. These are probably in the neighborhood of 300 or more. That would be a significant fraction of the total large extra-high voltage transformers in the US. For perspective, in the US right now, on an annual basis, we probably manufacture less than 50 per year, or having manufacturing capability for less than 50 per year. Of course we don’t have the manufacturing capability right now in the US to manufacture at the very highest voltage levels – 765 KV.

Bill: Where are those made, by the way?

John: A lot of them are made in Brazil, Japan, Korea and so forth. They’re all non-domestic sources.

Bill: And we don’t have these just sitting around? There’s not a replacement for every one? We don’t have 300?

John: We do not have 300 spares of these.

Bill: What do they cost?

John: These are tens of millions of dollars per unit. The size of these are also enormous. They represent very significant logistical efforts to move and install these transformers. We’re talking about a three-phase unit that could weigh in the neighborhood of about 600 tons or more. Under normal conditions it requires six months or more planning in logistical support to get that heavy piece of apparatus from wherever it’s being received off of some ship, inland, over the right roads and rail connections and bridge underpasses and all those other things that need to be considered. Then it takes a highly skilled, highly trained crew to actually do the movement and installation of these. There’s only a limited amount of highly trained crews – the special shipment vehicles and things like that, that can handle these sort of things. So even if we had these spares available, it would still mean weeks and weeks of effort to logistically move these things to the right locations, because we can’t anticipate exactly which ones will be damaged. That’s dependent on what the actual laydown of the geomagnetic storm would be when it does occur. There could be some variation there.

Bill: Exactly. Let’s take a little bit of a break here and go back and let’s talk about – in 90 seconds you could lose all 300 of these key transformers. When we come back, let’s talk about what might happen if that happens.

[0:25:09 – 0:29:23 break]

Bill: We are indeed back to Off the Grid Radio. It’s Bill Heid and I’m talking to John Kappenman today about geomagnetic storms and some of the effects. On John’s website I’m reading right now, if you have one of these storms that we’ve been talking about, you can lose all 300 of these key transformers within 90 seconds. It’s just going to cut America’s power. It’s one thing to lose your cell phone and be annoyed by that, or to not have you GPS and pull into the wrong restaurant in downtown Chicago, or whatever. But it’s quite another thing to have 300 key transformers go down. John, what would that look like for people in America, for this to happen? Let’s just go – it sounds like science fiction, it sounds like one of these movies that maybe are a little crazy – what’s the movie, 2012 or something, that’s kind of a nutty movie? But what might happen?

John: The first thing, I guess, that would be noticeable by the public is the immediate loss of lighting within buildings. You’d be down to – if you have a building equipped with emergency lighting around exit stairs and things like that. You’d have people that are maybe stranded in situations because of the sudden loss of power. That’s certainly the case with large metropolitan regions with subway systems and so forth. You’d have to begin evacuation procedures for those types of people.

Bill: If you were in a skyscraper in Miami, and it’s in the middle of summer, and you have an office job there, you can’t get down the elevator, it suddenly gets a little warm in there, and the windows are sealed for the most cases. You have all kinds of issues like this. Then you’ve got the food issue. All of a sudden we’ve got …

John: I would the next big crisis point would be things that would degrade within a very short period of time after the initial loss of power. One of the things that would occur would be major traffic snarl ups because of the loss of street lighting, signal lighting, things like that. You have to worry next about the availability of potable water. Essentially, all of your municipal water treatment and sewage treatment facilities would be lost immediately. The only thing that you would have left is the available water pressure in the municipal system, and that will only last as long as the demand placed on it from users. That demand could spike as people start to draw tap water for some sort of reserves and so forth. Probably within a matter of a couple of hours, you would have lost all of your municipal water resources as those water towers are drained and the pressure drops out of the system. In high-rise buildings and so forth, big electric pumps are needed to pump that water up to higher elevations in the buildings anyway, so that may be more immediate consequences in those sort of situations. Treatment of sewage will be a major problem going forward from that. There could be consequences there as well. Loss of transportation systems of all sorts will become a cascading problem. You may only have available to you the amount of fuel that’s in the tank of your car at the time that the blackout occurs. You probably will not be able to count on being resupplied in fuel in any way, because that also requires electricity to operate pumps at filling stations. They may have some standby off-grid generation of available at those sites, but again, that’s going to be rapidly depleted as they pump out their storage tanks at any particular filling station. Foods – perishable foods – will probably be lost within 12 hours to 24 hours after the event. The same becomes a critical problem for perishable medications. Again, if you look at the statistics, there’s something like a million Type 1 Diabetes sufferers in the US alone that could be placed in serious health consequences within a matter of just a few days if they are cut off from their insulin supplies. Telecommunications will probably be gone within a matter of two to three days. Many of the telecommunications centers have some level of backup generation that they design into the facility but the problem becomes that those generators eventually run out of fuel and the ability to resupply fuel to them is a serious issue. Even if you’re on natural gas supply, in residences and so forth, the problem with natural gas is many of the natural gas appliances that we depend upon – furnaces in particular – also require electric power to be available in order to operate and control those furnaces. Heating could become a major issue, especially if this occurs during a severe cold snap, which could add ac complicating factor. Those are the ways that these interdependencies that we have on electric power begin to stack up and impact virtually every other critical food, water and service supply that we need in the country.

Bill: So John, as you tell this story, why don’t you update us – we’ve only got a little time left – why don’t you update us a little bit. You tell this story in front of Congress and as I listen to it, I start fidgeting about in my chair. I’ve heard it before and it makes me nervous about it, because it seems like it’s a when, not if, situation. It also seems – I don’t know how a congressman could sit there and listen to your testimony and not vote on some sort of legislation that would help secure this – I don’t know what it would be, I don’t understand the technology necessarily – but what’s been happening? The last time we talked to you, you were going to testify again. Can you bring us up to date a little bit on that?

John: In the last Congress, in I think May or June of last year, the House of Representatives did unanimously approve a bill called the Grid Bill, House Resolution 5026. This bill would have set in motion efforts to harden the power grid and make it more resilient against these sorts of threats that exist in today’s power grid. It would also deal with the cyber security threat, electromagnetic pulse threat and severe space weather, geomagnetic and solar storm threat that we’re talking about. The Senate was not able to act on that bill in the last Congress. As a result, it did not become law, it did not pass. I’m uncertain how the new Congress will view this and what measures they will take. I think some form of this bill will be re-introduced in Congress and further evaluation will be done in formulating a bill that hopefully would get the quick approval of both the House and the Senate.

Bill: We’ll get you back on sometime down the road when we hear a little more about that. So there’s hope there, but it’s always – anytime with government, you’re dealing with monolithic things … we’re also running out of money so it’s difficult to appropriate funds for this these days as well, I would assume?

John: Actually, there was no requirement for appropriation. This was more of a regulatory set of mandates, that would have been imposed on the power grid.

Bill: So they’re going to shift the costs onto the electric users, so we’re all going to be paying for this.

John: Yeah. Either way, whether it’s done through some sort of government appropriation or through the rate structure of the electric energy usage, society ultimately does pay for this hardening.

Bill: So we’re going to be paying higher electrical rates, probably one way or another and this could be the result of some of this legislation.

John: Yeah. And the impact on rates was not significant. We’re talking fractions of a percent in total cost that would be borne by the end users.

Bill: It seems like a good deal on the surface, doesn’t it? At least for somebody to do something. This seems like the single, biggest threat, to me. We talk about Homeland Security – I don’t know what’s a bigger threat than this. As we get ready to sign off here, John, do you have any closing comments on the size of this threat?

John: It arguably could be the largest natural disaster the country and society could face. It could lead to the extermination of millions of innocent people. The inability of the country to even continue to exist. And I agree, I can’t think of anything more important that we need to be worried about than this. These storms do not occur often enough to force society to learn its lessons from actually experiencing these events. These are low probability or low frequency of event occurrences. But the consequences are almost infinite, so we have this zero times infinite sort of problem here, as far as the probability being quite small, but the consequences being unimaginable and unthinkable, and intolerable for society.

Bill: Well said, John. We have to close out there. We want to thank you so much for your time. It’s John Kappenman from the Storm Analysis Consultants. John, thank you so much for your time. It’s always very sobering to hear from you and we look forward to talking to you again soon.

John: OK. Thank you, Bill.

[0:42:41 – 0:47:02 break]

Bill: We are back. It’s Bill Heid and I’ve got my friend and partner on the phone, Brian Brawdy. Brian’s – where the heck are you, Brian? Are birds dropping from the sky where you’re at like they are everywhere else?

Brian: No, Bill, but I will tell you – I want to get your opinion on those red shouldered blackbirds dropping from the sky, because now they’re saying it’s fireworks. But today, as you know Bill, I’m very excited to announce to all the rest of our listeners, that Off the Grid News – we’re going to get out and get on the road. We’re going to learn about breaking news stories around the country and we’re going to find ways, like I am today, of spreading not only the Off the Grid message but being able to do some reporting for Off the Grid News as well. To that point, I’m in Cleveland, Ohio, all week long, doing some television appearances highlighting both the PowerSource and the PowerHub, because as you know, those are the two main pieces of gear that we use to be able to broadcast from wherever we go.

Bill: You bet, Brian, and you’re in Cleveland and you’re doing some shows. I think we talked before – you did a spot for FOX just recently?

Brian: Yes, sir, we did FOX about an hour ago. Yesterday morning we did both the NBC affiliate and the CBS affiliate. Tomorrow morning we have an ABC affiliate and a different version of FOX News here in Cleveland. And Bill, it all goes back to what you were speaking about with John, emergency preparedness. What are you going to do when you go to flick the switch and there’s no power? What are you going to do if the grid fails? What are you going to do if even at a local level there’s a power outage? A blackout, a brownout, something caused by an ice storm – what are you going to do to be able to supply electricity for yourself, for your family, for your coworkers? That’s the main message of what we’ve been doing and I will tell you media around the country has been lining up, Bill, to cover our story.

Bill: Well, it’s a great story. As you said, it dovetails well. Every time I listen to John Kappenman, I start out really smiling and enthusiastic – it’s always a great interview and fun to talk to John. Then – Jeremy can see me here – I start slumping down a little bit in my seat as he tells what the repercussions are to a major cataclysmic storm like a Carrington Effect type storm, which he says – and he’s testified before Congress – that it’s a when, not if, story. So as you say, everything from a simple ice storm, which everyone can get their hands around that. We’ve all experienced it. To something as crazy, but predictable, like the solar storm that he says is going to happen. We’ve got 300 major transformers in this country – key transformers. He said they can go out in 90 seconds.

Brian: Isn’t that unbelievable, Bill? And then when you marry that with what Porter Stansberry and you and I have discussed about even if it isn’t a solar storm – not the if, but the when, that our grid could collapse for other reasons – what a powerful, or I should say lack of a powerful, one-two punch.

Bill: That’s a great point, Brian. Porter also has a when, not if, story. When we talked to Porter it’s – Porter, how do you base your economic analysis or your investment advice? The only thing he’s willing to bet on are these things that he says there’s basically no way out. When you talk about the fact that the Indians and the Chinese are consuming such a large amount of coal that they’re taking the coal away from our systems – I think he mentioned two of the companies that are big power producers in this country – are in deep, deep trouble financially. They’re operating at a loss. That can’t continue to happen. Something’s gotta give – Jack Nicholson, right?

Brian: Absolutely.

Bill: What’s going to happen?

Brian: And you know, Bill, for me, part of my 2011 or my New Year’s resolution, you and I and the team at Solutions from Science and Off the Grid News – be it both the radio show and the reporting staff – we work really hard to prepare for the when, not the if. Part of my mindset in 2011 is that you and I, and our entire team, is doing the best job we can do to get the message out there. For me it’s like, I hope people are listening. The reframe in my mind is my sense of goodwill, my sense of commitment – of stewardship, if you will – to the rest of humanity, is doing everything that we continue to do as a company and as a group of business professionals to spread the message that you have to be prepared. If people don’t want to listen to that message, Bill, candidly I’ve developed the mindset “shame on you.” What’s the old thing? You can lead a horse to water but you can’t make them drink? Our company’s doing everything we can to find experts in all types of fields, like Porter in the financial field, John in the scientific field. We’re doing everything we can to eliminate any of the hurdles so that our listeners go “I believe them. I better take action now to be able to protect myself and my family.” I think we’re doing a great job in spreading the message and I really hope people listen. I really hope that they look at what we’re trying to report and say “I want to be on the up side when this happens.”

Bill: That’s a great point, Brian, but I think what happens so often – and let’s look at what happened Y2K – is you had a large number of people who got scared and then nothing happened. In philosophical circles we would call this “granting revisionary immunity” to new issues when they come up. The mind can’t process that because, look, it didn’t happen before. There’s all these signs we have every day. You’ve got crazy stuff in the news, whether it’s a terror threat … you walk through the airport, we’re always on “orange” or whatever. So at some point, we get worn down to the levels of the noise. It’s like white noise when we hear these threat levels and we just tuck them aside like Greek abstractions and they don’t mean anything to us anymore. What Brian and I are trying to tell everybody is, this is not a drill. This is real. This is going to happen. Economically, this grid situation – it’s vulnerable.

Brian: And I think, Bill, that’s for me – as I said earlier – the part of the New Year’s resolution. We’re going to continue to do everything we can to spread the message and we hope that people allow our message to rise above the level of white noise. Because how many experts do you need? Remember, Bill, that old “if it looks like a fish and it smells like a fish and it swims like a fish” – you’ve pretty much got a fish. It’s not like you and I are sitting around going “you know what? Let’s do a little bit of fear mongering today and let’s make up these stories.” We’re interviewing experts. And even now, media across the country, Bill, are asking us questions like they’re even starting to worry and to wake up that this is going to happen. So hopefully our listeners will allow us, as I say, to rise above the white noise, because energy independence at the personal level is something that in 2011 every one of us should focus on.

Bill: One of your mantras is “are you able to take care of yourself and your family?” Who are you going to call on? Because the government’s not going to help you here, ladies and gentlemen. The government is not going to do anything. John, again, just told us that the Senate – here he is testifying before the House and the Senate, and he got the house to go along with this, Brian, and the last body that was in there. The Senate heard the story and he looked at them and he said, basically, the implications are that hundreds of millions of people are going to die – and they couldn’t get the votes to at least try to create some kind of regulation for the power companies, to say maybe we need to harden the grid in some way. He couldn’t even get senators to join in and say “yeah, this is a problem.” And we think it may be the single largest threat that we have to our country.

Brian: Because a lot them, Bill – and this is going to sound maybe a little more negative than I normally am – but the big wigs in the Senate and the House know that they’re heading to a mountain in West Virginia.

Bill: Yeah, they have hardened situations.

Brian: They’re going to head to their bunkers so 100 million people? “Oh, yeah, great … they’re going to lose their power …” They’re going to put into their little shuttles and taken to wherever and reconstituted and maybe it’s no longer the mountains of West Virginia, it was the last time I was there. They believe that they’re – clearly, just my opinion – our little disclaimer – when you have politicians that think they’re above the law, they think they’re above everything. They listen to our stories and go “yeah, yeah, yeah. Alright, this could affect other people but we’re a senator. We’re a US representative. It’s not going to affect us.” I think they’re going to be sadly mistaken.

Bill: Let’s hope that everyone wakes up. We’re going to continue to do what we can, what you’ve been doing. You’re in Cleveland now, where are you going to go next?

Brian: Well, Bill, just before we got ready to come on air, I got three phone calls from television stations in Tampa, Florida, so we’re going to leave Cleveland this weekend, move on to Tampa, Florida, spreading the message of …. it reminds me of that old commercial, Bill. Remember the Men’s Hair Club? “I’m not just the client, I’m the president” – or however that commercial used to go? This is stuff that I’m very excited to be part of our team, but I rely on our products. I’m not just a spokesperson; I’m not just a reporter. In order for me to be able to do my job, day in and day out, I need the PowerSource 1800 and I need the PowerHub Plus. And as you travel and you do these stories, the media goes “you’re so passionate about this!” It’s like, look, coming or not coming, I have a responsibility to my family, to my friends, to the people that count on me. I have a responsibility to minimize an attack on the power grid – be it from Mother Nature or more manmade derived attack – I have a responsibility. Not a desire, Bill, I have an absolute responsibility to the people around me, to protect them when that happens. I’m very passionate and thankful that I’m going to be able to do so, and I hope our listeners can cultivate that same sense of – you and I aren’t suggesting “this would be a good idea, to personally secure your power supply.” It’s your responsibility. It’s not your right, it’s your responsibility. If you’re the head of the household, or head of a family, or you’re a family member, or you’re a community leader – it’s your responsibility to help those around you craft their own, personal power plan. Wherever the TV stations call us – thankfully you’ve tasked me to go wherever they call from – so I’ll be taking off for Tampa, Florida shortly after this.

Bill: Well I appreciate you calling in, Brian. Good luck and good travels to you. Blessings. And we will talk to you soon.

Brian: Sounds good. Bill, thanks so much. Farewell.

Bill: Thank you, Brian. Thanks for listening to us here on Off the Grid Radio. Be sure to email your questions or comments, critiques, to [email protected]. You can also find us on Facebook by going to Facebook.com/offthegridnews or we’re also on Twitter at offthegridnews. Thanks again for listening. This is Bill Heid.

[0:58:48]
© Copyright Off The Grid News