Preparedness Is Next to Godliness
The creator of a new broadcast series about a solar flare that knocks the world back to the Dark Ages says her show is more than a cautionary tale – it's a playbook for making sure you're ready should such a disaster occur.
It seems nearly weekly we see natural disasters ranging from hurricanes to earthquakes, tsunamis to devastating tornados. These are acts of nature over which no one has control, but it's precisely because we have no control that we must be aware of the potentially devastating consequences of these forces of nature.
As destructive and tragic as such acts of God have been, it was a less-reported event on Sept. 8 that could have had the greatest impact on our collective way of life. On that day, the sun released an X class solar flare that interrupted radio waves and knocked out satellite reception. It was the worse such solar flare we have seen in a decade, but not the last one we will see, according to Dr. John Foster of MIT.
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Dr. Foster, an astrophysicist, specializes in solar weather and says that it is not "if" but "when" we will get hit by another flare, possibly as powerful as the one that hit the earth in 1859. That flare was referred to as the Carrington Event and was so powerful it knocked out telegraph wires -- and the Aurora Borealis was seen as far south as Italy. If a similar event were to happen today, generations of technological advancement later, its effects would be catastrophic to day-to day living.
That is one of the reasons I created DAILY BREAD, a new faith-based dramatic series that explores what would happen if a solar flare knocked out electricity around the world and challenges people to consider their level of preparedness for such a devastating act of God ... or man.
Many people don't realize that if an EMP of any origin is unleashed on Earth (and North Korea has specifically threatened to hit us with one), anything with electronics will be fried. That means most cars will die along with cell phones, computers, generators, and even the worldwide electric grid will no longer work. How dire would those circumstances be? Analysts project that only 10 percent of the population would survive.
It wouldn't be the end of the world, but it would most certainly be the end of our world as we know it.
We created some characters in DAILY BREAD who are unprepared for what they consider unimaginable, and some who are prepared for what they know is possible. One of the former is Holly, who is stranded in the DC area and must make it 300 miles to her sister's house. She finds a handbook given to her by her sister – a "prepper" who has made provisions for such an event – and must put together an on the fly a "go-bag" with basic clothing, food, water, first aid and implements of protection to keep herself alive.
Then there's Briana, a 13-year-old girl who is prepared because she took her go-bag to school and was ready to make the 20 mile trek back to her prepper camp and deal with the obstacles along the way on her three-week odyssey. One scene we specifically included as instructive to audiences shows Briana laying out the items in her go-bag – we hope viewers see it as a checklist of sorts for what they can do to be ready.
One of the questions we asked Dr. Foster in our interview with him – which appears throughout the credits of the six episodes of the first season of the show that have been released -- was why the grid isn't hardened to prevent this type of widespread outage. His reply was astounding; the solution is something as simple as a GFI switch (a device that shuts off an electric power circuit when it detects that current is flowing along an unintended path) to uncouple all the grids from Canada down through the US. But that is not what the utility companies have chosen to do, leaving us vulnerable to a solar flare or EMP (electro-magnetic pulse) that could hit the continent ... or the globe.
There are also many prophecies in the Bible that talk about the radical change in weather patterns as we grow closer to the time of our Lord's return. We fashioned DAILY BREAD to be a prototype of how to act and respond should something like this happen – really, how to not just survive but thrive.
For example, a group of millennial women who work on a popular cooking show, the central characters in the series, are stranded on a small farm. They realize the water pump is electric and they will now have to bring buckets of water to the house for everything from cooking to pouring in the backs of the toilets. They understand what they have to do, but how to do they find the will and humanity to do it? They personally have plenty of food, water, wood for fireplaces, chickens for eggs, a milk cow and a stock of guns and ammunition for protection, but they must decide a moral question as critical as a survival question: Are they going to reach out and help others or keep all of this to themselves?
These are the kinds of questions we'd all face should we ever find ourselves in these circumstances. It will not be pretty, but we hope and pray our characters show civilized ways to cope and rebuild society without electricity. They make the point that it has only been a little more than 100 years that we even had it and we need to recall how people lived and thrived without it.
As the series' title suggests, all the answers are, in very real ways, tied to turning our hearts to God and humbly asking him to give us, this day, our daily bread.
Nina May is the founder of Renaissance Women Productions and the creator, writer and director of DAILY BREAD, now available for download at RWPVideo.org.
