Video of solar flare courtesy of NASA

Good morning, Team! It’s Friday!

Pardon the technical jargon and please humor me through this week’s blog…it wanders a bit.

Recent headlines in one of the technical journals I subscribe to mentioned something we can all relate to: Loss of electrical service. Imagine, if you can, there would be

•No TV
•No computer
•No cell phones

You may have heard of solar flares and the impact they can have on the electrical grid. A CME is worse. It is slower and it disturbs the earth’s magnetic field more severely. There is also a 10% chance, according to experts on this subject, an event similar in magnitude back in 1859 (known as the Carrington effect) that knocked out telegraph systems in the US and Europe, could happen in the next decade. In case you think those odds or the stat is unrealistic, there was a smaller but similar event more recent in 1989 in Quebec that impacted a major city, shutting down the Montreal Metro and the airport.

Why did this grab my attention or why should it matter to you?

We tend to take things for granted, like: electricity and the sun.

My good friend Dave from Montana spent his life in the electrical business and shares stories about electrical outage restorations. He recalled one during our conversation just last week where an elderly customer called in…the next morning…hoping a power line crew could get out “by the weekend”. Tell me your heart doesn’t skip a beat when power goes out during an electrical storm for more than thirty seconds and you start worrying about food spoiling in the freezer. Imagine waiting (patiently) for several days…

Now think about how much you rely on the sun. Pretty much everything we do hinges on this fiery ball a mere 93 million miles away…and we plan our lives around it, every single day. If the sun started spewing excess plasma our direction, what would you do?

One of the many issues leaders are asked to consider is disaster planning (i.e. Zika virus, computer virus, connectivity issues, wood ticks, lawsuits or floods) and now we have to think about explosions on the sun?

Yes.

Leaders are not rewarded for complacency, they are charged with finding ways to eradicate it.  Come prepared…or stay home.

Have a blessed weekend!