SAN JUAN, Puerto Rico (AP) — Margarita Aponte and her relatives cleared the road in front of her house with two oxen Sunday, then drove an hour from her devastated hometown in central Puerto Rico to the old telegraph building in the capital of San Juan.
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| ELECTROMAGNETIC PULSE ... |
“It’s ringing, it’s ringing, it’s ringing!” Aponte, a janitor, screamed as her phone connected to free Wi-Fi and her Facetime call went through to the mainland.
- Her eyes filled with tears as she talked with nephews, uncles, brothers and sisters in Florida and Massachusetts for the first time since Maria destroyed nearly every cellphone and fiber optic connection on this U.S. territory of 3.4 million people.
“There’s no communication. We’re in God’s hands,” Yesenia Gomez, a kitchen worker, said as she left a message for her mother in the neighboring Dominican Republic.
Dozens of other Puerto Ricans opted to pull over to the side of the road along various highways where cellphone signals were strongest.
Carlos Ocasio, a maintenance worker, picked his way through tree branches and broken glass bottles as he found a spot with a good signal. Soon, he was able to reach his brother in New Jersey.
- “My throat got a little choked up and I couldn’t talk for a minute,” he said. “They’re calling me from everywhere, asking when I’m going to arrive.”
WITH AN EMP THERE WILL BE NO RADIO!
Others in Puerto Rico and abroad called a local radio station to provide names, numbers, exact addresses and pictures of their loved ones in hopes of reconnecting.But for hundreds of thousands of Puerto Ricans living on the U.S. mainland, there has been only silence from the island.
Shirley Rodriguez, a resident of New York’s Brooklyn borough, said she has more than 30 relatives in Puerto Rico but she is especially concerned about her 66-year-old mother, Mildred Rodriguez, who has diabetes and pulmonary hypertension and lives in Hormigueros on the island’s west coast.
Rodriguez last spoke to her family before the storm and her relatives were planning on being together for it. Since then, calls to their cellphones have gone to voicemail.
“I’m absolutely numb at this point. It’s a rollercoaster of emotion,” she said. “Not knowing is extremely agonizing.”
Her mother-in-law is in the San Juan area and somehow managed to connect with someone who works for the mayor of Hormigueros, who was able to tell Rodriguez that the area where her parents live escaped flooding. But she still doesn’t know what the actual conditions are like.
Some in Puerto Rico expressed anger over what they said was a lack of communication from cellphone providers about which towers were working so they could drive in that direction.“They’re not giving us any information,” said Ricardo Castellanos, a business consultant. “We’re in a state of emergency.”
Castellanos visits the Wi-Fi hotspots twice a day to try to reach his two daughters in the central town of Gurabo and has been able to send a few pictures to friends on social media of the devastation the hurricane left behind.
As people continued to search for a connection in silence, some occasionally spoke up to offer unsolicited advice. “I didn’t move my phone around, and I got a signal,” said one woman to a man complaining that he was in a dead zone.
Nearby, retiree Sylvia Calero tapped her phone with impeccably manicured bright orange fingernails as she tried to reach three brothers and three grandchildren in the hard-hit coastal town of Aguadilla in northwest Puerto Rico. She spent an hour walking up and down the upscale Condado district unable to find a signal before driving to the free Wi-Fi hotspot.
“Zero communication,” she said.
Leaning against a boarded-up window, illustrator Avalon Clare from Colorado worried about getting off the island. She and her partner were supposed to fly out of Puerto Rico on Saturday but the flight was canceled. It was rescheduled for Thursday, but Clare said she had no way to confirm whether that was still the case.
“The only think I can do is text,” she said. “We’re trying to leave because we can’t work without internet ... We only have half a tank of gas. We’re running out of cash. It’s just getting harder.”
Jenniffer Gonzalez, Puerto Rico’s non-voting representative in Congress, urged people to remain calm, noting that the towers of one cellphone provider that had constant coverage after the hurricane collapsed Sunday.
“Don’t become desperate,” she said, adding that if anyone was in danger, local officials would have been notified by now.
Only about 25 percent of towers were working in the San Juan metro area.
Cell service provider T-Mobile said it reached a deal with other providers to help reconnect their customers, saying callers should use the roaming data option to find a connection. Officials said customers would not be charged extra.
Claro was installing 40 generators to power up its towers, and expected 50 more generators to arrive from the Dominican Republic once a ferry from the neighboring island is operational.
Gov. Ricardo Rossello said a major underwater cable had been repaired, which would allow people to make long-distance calls and improve internet service. Two planes from Spain’s telephone company also arrived over the weekend to help re-establish services.
Persistence paid off for many who waited up to three hours to find a signal, including Wanda Nieves, a government worker who stood at one of the free Wi-Fi hotspots.
She heard about it on the radio and drove 30 minutes to reach the site. Nieves spoke to family in Florida and Michigan and did not plan to return for more calls or messages.
“We’ve already given signs of life,” she said. “Now we just wait for Puerto Rico to recover.”
HAVING READ THAT NOW THINK ABOUT AND EMP ...
Nuclear bombs trigger a strange effect that can fry your electronics — here's how it works ...
An illustration of electromagnetic radiation. ShutterstockNuclear blasts trigger an effect called electromagnetic pulse, or EMP.
EMP can disrupt or even destroy electronics from miles away.
Blasts miles above a country like the US might severely damage its electric and telecommunications infrastructure.
A nuclear detonation creates plenty of terrifying effects, including a blinding (and burning) flash of light, a building-toppling blast wave, an incendiary fireball, and radioactive fallout that can drift for hundreds of miles.
But there's a lesser-known consequence of a nuclear explosion that can drastically expand its damage zone: an electromagnetic pulse, or EMP.
EMPs are rapid, invisible bursts of electromagnetic energy. They occur in nature, most frequently during lightning strikes, and can disrupt or destroy nearby electronics. However, nuclear EMPs can cover an entire continent and cripple tiny circuits inside modern electronics on a massive scale. The power grid, phone and internet lines, and other infrastructure that uses metal is also prone to effects that resemble those of a devastating geomagnetic storm.
Savvy readers called this to our attention after we published expert advice on why you should never get in a car after a nuclear bomb is detonated. Brooke Buddemeier, a radiation expert at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, suggested sheltering deep within a building instead, and tuning in to a radio for instructions.
But a reader named Taylor K. pointed out that "radios, computers, anything that use[s] electrical transmission to power itself will be effectively neutralized" by the bomb's EMP.
He's correct — but fortunately only in certain situations.
How electromagnetic pulse works
Nuclear explosions don't make EMPs directly; the effect requires a couple of key ingredients.
The first is a nuke's invisible burst of gamma rays, a form of light typically emitted by the "hottest and most energetic objects in the universe," according to NASA. A small fraction of a bomb's energetic yield — between 0.1% and 0.5% — is emitted as gamma rays. These slam into air molecules, knock off electrons, and accelerate the negatively charged particles to about 90% of the speed of light.
Earth's magnetic field then shuttles many of these high-speed electrons toward the planet's poles in a corkscrew-like pattern. The electrons respond to this movement by letting off their newly acquired energy as a powerful soup of electromagnetic radiation, including radio waves.
This is a nuclear electromagnetic pulse. It happens within a fraction of a microsecond, and the surge of energy can overload or "shock" sensitive electronic devices — especially the kinds we heavily rely on today.
A nuclear test blast. Public domain"[T]he radiation can be collected by metallic and other conductors at a distance, just as radio waves are picked up by antennas," according to an unclassified 1977 report from the Department of Defense and Department of Energy. "The energy from the EMP is received in such a very short time, however, that it produces a strong electric current which could damage the equipment. An equal amount of energy spread over a long period of time, as in conventional radio reception, would have no harmful effect."
When EMP passes through metal objects like a phone, computer, or radio, they can "catch" this incredibly powerful pulse. This can generate a rogue current of electricity that moves through a modern device's tiny circuits and can disrupt or even destroy them. Power transmission or telecommunications equipment, meanwhile, can overload from the excess current, spark, and fail for miles around.
If you've ever turned on a microwave oven and noticed your phone's Wi-Fi or Bluetooth connection momentarily drop out, you've experienced disruptive electromagnetic waves — and had a very small taste of what could happen with an EMP.
The intensity of a nuclear detonation's EMP is about 30,000 to 50,000 volts per meter — thousands of times greater than the one your microwave bleeds off.
Fortunately, not all nuclear blasts are created equal when it comes to EMP.
Why altitude is everything
Nuclear detonations that occur dozens or hundreds of miles above Earth could have devastating consequences compared to those that happen on the ground.
At a high elevation, gamma rays can more easily spread out, hitting many upper-atmosphere air molecules over a large area at once. The low density of air allows electrons to move more freely and maximize the intensity of an EMP.
In fact, a 2008 report by the EMP Commission suggests that the right nuclear device detonated at the right altitude could bathe the entire continental US in EMP, disrupting telecommunications and power grid infrastructure to "catastrophic" effect.
But if an explosion were to occur closer to the ground, many of the gamma rays would slam into the earth. Those rays would have a harder time creating a large electric field that could generate widespread EMP. And the greater density of air wouldn't help, either.
An illustration of a nuclear blast in a city. ShutterstockThe US government actively plans for 15 disaster scenarios, one of which is a terrorist-caused nuclear detonation that occurs close to the ground with a yield of about 10 kilotons — roughly 66% as powerful as the Hiroshima blast.
This setup is the one we discussed with Buddemeier, and in that case he says the nuclear blastitself would give you a lot more to worry about than bricked electronics or power loss.
"[T]here would be some localized EMP effects," he told Business Insider in an email, "but if you were close enough for you equipment to be damaged by EMP (within a couple miles), then you are also close enough to be significantly impacted by the blast wave."
Lawrence Livermore National LaboratoryPut another way, you may not survive inside this zone, which can stretch a couple of miles in diameter. And if you did, you'd have to worry about climbing out of rubble before checking to see whether your radio still worked.
It's more likely, Buddemeier says, that within about 5 miles of the blast "you may have a disruptive impact, which doesn’t 'fry' your equipment, but can cause 'latch-up' (e.g., like the endless spinning hourglass on your phone) until restarted."
There are hundreds of variables that determine whether or not an EMP affects electronics, Buddemeier says, including "the size and orientation of your device, the structure of the building you are in, plug-in or battery, if it is behind a surge protector," and so on.
Because many radios have simpler, less sensitive circuitry than a phone, they're likely to be a first line of information after a ground blast.
"There is a good chance that there will be plenty of functioning radios even within a few miles of the event and that radio transmission towers outside of the impacted area will still be able to send information on the safest strategy to keep you and your family safe," Buddemeiersays.
