(Bloomberg) — Mama always told me not to look into the sights ofthe sun. Oh, but Mama, that's where the fun is.

No one understands that Bruce Springsteen song more than WilliamMurtagh. In a small government office near the foothills of theRocky Mountains, Murtagh and other federal employees monitor thesun 24 hours a day, waiting for it to erupt and fling a cloud ofsuperheated, supercharged gas toward Earth.

The Space Weather Prediction Center in Boulder, Colorado, sendsalerts to power grids, airlines, oil drillers and even pigeontrainers on the risks of geomagnetic storms that can disruptcommunications, electric power, and, yes, perhaps the birds' senseof direction.

The center also may provide the first clue to the worst- casescenario described in academic and government reports: widespreadpower outages, food shortages and trillions of dollars in economicdamages. The reinsurance industry is increasingly sounding alarms,calling space weather a potential hazard in today's wiredworld.

While the U.S. has taken steps to prepare for a mega-storm fromspace, the center is often able to provide only an estimated30-minute warning of geomagnetic disruptions. The government spendsless than $10 million on the facility, which must fight annuallyfor funding within the National Oceanic and AtmosphericAdministration. The little office relies on data from agingsatellites it doesn't control and that need to be replaced.

Forgetting History

What the public and Washington may have forgotten is the longhistory of geomagnetic storms. “It is in the human nature to assessthe threat based on your own lifespan,” said Murtagh, a scientistwho is the center's program coordinator and has a background inforecasting.

In March 1989, the Hydro-Quebec power system in Canada collapsedduring a geomagnetic disturbance, leaving 6 million people withoutelectricity in a blackout that lasted more than nine hours.Montreal's subway system was paralyzed in morning rush hour.

The storm may have come close to “toppling power systems fromthe New England and Mid-Atlantic regions of the U.S. to theMidwest,” John Kappenman, a space weather consultant, wrote in a2010 report for the federally funded Oak Ridge National Laboratory.He has added the Pacific Northwest to that list.

The Halloween Storm in October 2003 disrupted oil and gasdrilling. Malmo, Sweden, suffered a blackout. At the time, someU.S. lawmakers were pushing to eliminate the center's funding andshift the work elsewhere.

In Dark

A 2008 report published by the National Academy of Sciences drewmore attention to the risks. It cited Kappenman's work, which saida severe storm could zap hundreds of the U.S. grid's high-voltagetransformers, leaving more than 130 million people in the dark formonths or longer, with economic costs possibly reaching severaltrillion dollars.

“The National Academy report changed everything,” said BobRutledge, who's in charge of the space center's forecast office.“There's a lot of disagreement on this, but it put this on theradar.”

Today, the space-weather office has about 40,000 subscribersworldwide for its e-mailed alerts, including watches giving a dayor more of advance notice of possible events and roughly 30-minutewarnings for imminent storms.

Alerts go to grids, airlines, satellite firms, governments andcompanies using satellite-based, high-precision GPS services formining, land surveys and deep-sea drilling, Murtagh said.

Pigeons Lost

Some pigeon trainers monitor forecasts for geomagnetic storms,suspecting the disturbances play a role in “smash” races, whenbirds return later than expected or don't come back at all.

On very rare occasions “they'll completely disappear off theface of the Earth,” said Frank McLaughlin, co-owner of Hanson,Massachusetts-based McLaughlin Lofts, which breeds racing pigeons.“And nobody would really know what happened.”

Geomagnetic storms are typically associated with coronal massejections, or violent blasts of hot, magnetized gas from the sun.When those clouds slam into the Earth's magnetic field — thefastest in less than a day — they may result in geomagneticstorms.

The mother of modern geomagnetic storms is known as theCarrington Event. In August and September of 1859, auroras lit upthe skies from Honolulu to Queensland in Australia. Telegraphnetworks around the world experienced outages.

Disaster Looms

The storm was about four times larger than the 2003 disturbance,said Jeffrey Love, an adviser for geomagnetic research at the U.S.Geological Survey.

It's hard to say when another big one will arrive. If aCarrington-level storm were to strike again, zapping the NorthAmerican electric grid, it could be a disaster.

It might damage transformers across the grid, leaving as many as40 million people in the U.S. without power for 16 days to twoyears, according to a report last year by Lloyd's of London, theworld's oldest insurance market. Long-term outages risk disruptingfinancial markets and triggering “major and widespread socialunrest,” with estimated economic costs as high as $2.6 trillion,Lloyd's said.

The apocalyptic scenarios have their skeptics.

Frank Koza, executive director of infrastructure planning forregional grid operator PJM Interconnection LLC, said he doesn'tthink transformers would simultaneously fail in large numbers andlead to the long-term outages described by Kappenman.

“I'm struggling with that severe event John has proposed,” saidKoza. PJM operates a good chunk of the U.S. power grid in a13-state network in the Midwest and Mid- Atlantic.

Teeth Gnashing

Federal regulators have forced power companies to developstandards to protect the grid, though serious improvements willonly come with “wailing and gnashing of teeth on both sides,”Kappenman said.

He said the government has been slow to replace older satellitesproviding space-weather data and to bolster the small office, whichKappenman calls underfunded and under-appreciated.

The office has a staff of fewer than 40 employees and a numberof unfilled positions. Its budget for the current fiscal year is anestimated $9.6 million, according to figures from NOAA, part of theCommerce Department.

“They've accomplished a lot with little resources,” Kappenmansaid.

Budget Constraints

David Miller, a NOAA spokesman, said the space center's“operational system” is fully funded every year.

“Any oscillations in funding are on the development side, whichcan be affected by budget constraints, such as sequestration, whenthere is a need to prioritize operations that provide warnings andforecasts to protect life and property,” he said in an e-mail.

NOAA is working with NASA to resurrect a mothballed NASAsatellite, the Deep Space Climate Observatory, to bolster the agingfleet. The Air Force has turned to billionaire Elon Musk's company,Space Exploration Technologies Corp., to launch it.

The launch date, tentatively planned for November 2014, waspushed to January 2015 as NOAA absorbed automatic federal spendingcuts.

The observatory is a gap-filler for NASA's Advanced CompositionExplorer satellite, or ACE, which launched in 1997 and is long pastits mission life.

New Technology

A developing technology — a solar sail propelled by the sun'swinds and carrying space-weather instruments — is being closelywatched by scientists.

The spacecraft may be launched in 2016, said Charles Chafer,chief executive officer of Space Services Inc., a closely heldcompany based in Houston that is working on the project with NASAand Tustin, California-based L.Garde Inc.

It's too early to tell whether the giant sail will work. If itdoes, it may lower costs and double the warning time, Chafersaid.

Murtagh, who grew up in Ireland, joked that he was glad to seethe sun when he came to America. Yet he knows better than to staredirectly into its eyes and even tries to curb the enthusiasm ofyoung visitors to the space center who might be tempted to doso.

“The last thing I want them to do is run outside and look at thesun,” he said.

–With assistance from Michael Novatkoski inPrinceton.

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