It missed us by 9 days

I wish I had the source from where this randomly catalogued info in my brain came from, but specifically regarding the power grid going down in the event of a huge solar storm-From what I understood from whatever the heck I was reading, it can take up to a year to manufacture just 1 of the transformers you see outside on the telephone/power poles in your neighborhood. And if we got hit with a large enough storm, every last one of those will pretty much explode. They already occasionally explode on their own (they're filled with a fluid that tends to leak and if they aren't maintained they will overhead and *boom*) and chances are you've heard one pop and it sounded like a bomb or a giant firework. But the fact that it takes so long to produce them is almost as concerning as the fact that we haven't stockpiled any replacements for an emergency like a solar event. And since they're already hard to produce, that's going to be even worse when the manufacturers no longer have power to continue production.