“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.
Do you replace the power banks to keep them charged to 70%? Maybe also add some ham radios and walkie talkies to the stash.
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.
Faraday cages are useful. But CMEs are not solar flares. They are very different (though sometimes loosely correlated) phenomena.