“The exercise was held from May 8 to 9, 2024, at the Johns Hopkins Applied Physics Laboratory (APL) in Laurel, Maryland, and at a Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) site in Denver, Colorado.”
Article refers to a PDF of the report it’s based on:
https://www.jhuapl.edu/sites/default/files/2025-04/Space-Weather-TTX-Report-Summary-v3-FINAL.pdf
I have an old safe where i keep some old tech and power banks - just junk really but the Faraday is enough for any solar flare and i think it looks cool. Not sure what good that would do if all cell towers and satellites are fried though. Even fiber is unlikely to operate as I imagine most switches are not secured.
Last time I did research on this I came out entirely unconvinced of value of prepping here. Just the usual water, gas stove and bags of rice is really best bet and invest everything else back to local communities because economies of scale kicks ass.
During the recent Iberian Peninsula Blackout, which in practice meant a whole day without power and most of it without water, thanks to a past phase of mine as a bit of a prepper I:
Anyway, my point is not to go full prepper, my point is that some elements of that minset and practices will cover the far more common kind of problems - which happen maybe once every few years - that leave you without power and water for a few days.
One thing I did find out is that I probably need something like a solar powered powerbank for loading my tablet since that’s how I mostly read books nowadays (didn’t actually need one in this blackout as it was of just a day and as it was offline the charge was more than enough for it), so I’ve ordered one.
Little things like that mean you don’t actually get unecessary stress in a situation like this.
It’s not something that is going to save you from nuclear holocaust or in general the collapse of human civilization, but it will save you from spending days without food or water or the stress of not knowing what’s going on, such as in such a long and unsual blackout, a flood or other similar more frequent catastrophes.
Do you replace the power banks to keep them charged to 70%? Maybe also add some ham radios and walkie talkies to the stash.
There are powerbanks with solar cells and even in a day which is not sunny, those things will slowly charge the powerbank if you leave it under natural light for a few hours (from what I read you get roughly half the rated power from solar cells in a cloudy day).
Yeah it’s a safe in my office and I often go back to it for small projects so the stuff mostly works and in good contion just instead of a plastic box its a big ol’ iron safe as a lazy precaution and decoration.
One note on safe as a Faraday though is that it has to be a full metal without any rubber seals as any gaps will leak so an old safe is often perfect for this. It also needs to be closed so you want to disable the lock as it’s pita to use otherwise and you’ll never touch the devices there.
As you pointed out key to sustainable tech is that it has to be used from time to time as if you just put it away in a basement or something it might as well be as good as dead.