https://www.independent.co.uk/space/solar-storm-cme-internet-apocalypse-b1915462.html
2 different headlines by the UK's The Independent in the last 2 weeks !
Do they like 21 so much?
In New York City, it was from a switch-board at the Brewster station that quickly spread to destroy the whole building, and in Sweden, operators at Karlstad exchange first experienced equipment malfunction and faint smoke, then after a period of quiet the main fire started, leading to extensive equipment damage, studies say.
Similar reports emerged from various parts of the world, including India, the UK, and New Zealand of disturbances in electrical equipment and the then-nascent electric and telegraph wires.
These were due to magnetic fields generated on Earth by one of the biggest solar storms to have impacted the planet – known as the 1921 New York Railroad Storm.
“The effects were in terms of interference to radio communications, telegraph, and telephone systems, all of which were used in 1921,” Jeffrey Love, a Geophysicist in the Geomagnetism Program of the US Geological Survey (USGS), tells The Independent.
According to the executive summary of the report by P. Cannon et al. (2013), in response to a 1 in 100–200 year reasonable worst-case event of 5,000 nT min−1, “… around six super grid transformers in England and Wales and a further seven grid transformers in Scotland could be damaged … and taken out of service. The time to repair would be between weeks and months. In addition, current estimates indicate a potential for some local electricity interruptions of a few hours. … National Grid's analysis is that around two nodes in Great Britain could experience disconnection.” The report later notes that there are over 600 nodes in Great Britain, so the loss of power for an extended period would be limited to a few areas, but would be a severe emergency in those areas.