This got my attention recently when a good friend had to spend four days without electric power and no running water having to take care of sick family members during our recent Midwest blizzard.

No power, 18" inches of snow, 30 to 35+ mph winds (6 to 8+ foot drifts), nothing was moving except a group of first responders on snowmobiles, well pumps were inoperative due to no power, had to use a camp stove and wood burning fireplace because their 90+ HE gas furnace uses an electronic circuit board controlled ignition system, and of course, an electric stovetop unit.

And she grew up on a farm equipped with an outhouse and a well hand pump. By day 3 she was really missing both the outhouse and the hand pumped well.

A 1921 solar storm (not to mention an 1859 Carrington level event) would be an absolute nightmare for most of the Northern Hemisphere. I hear the experts saying that the circuit breakers built into the system would protect much of the power transmission infrastructure, but I've never been able to get an answer to what I see as one critical difference (probably wrong on my part, but maybe somebody knows the answer).

A solar storm on the magnitude of the 1921 event would most likely massively charge the entire power grid - not just a 'spike', but probably the entire grid at a level almost sure to trigger virtually all the built-in circuit breakers existing all across a modern day power transmission grid.

All that power resulting from the CME (Coronal Mass Ejection) has to go someplace - since we know from 1859 that such a CME would use transmission lines as a conduit (in 1859 it was the telegraph lines), would this type of event result in serious damage to the transmission lines themselves (being that the circuit breakers probably kick in)? Or would the massive burst of electrical current across the lines simply arc across the now tripped circuit breakers and damage even more of the transmission infrastructure?

Insights appreciated...