Members of the Michigan House Committee on Homeland Security and Foreign Influence heard a presentation from Keith Mazarin, president of MidAmerica Group, about a device the company says absorbs and dissipates electromagnetic pulses, protecting electronics and infrastructure.

Mazarin told the committee his company began in lightning-protection work, brought technology from Spain to Michigan in 2012 and discovered during testing that related methods could stop and dissipate EMP energy. "This unit's been tested by several laboratories here in The United States to take up to a 300,000 volt pulse," Mazarin said, adding the device is passive and requires only a ground connection.

The device, referred to in the presentation as the V8 and also called "VMAX" in places, is described by Mazarin as an absorption-and-dissipation system that does not require external power. He said an individual unit covers roughly a 125-foot diameter and that multiple units can be installed in series around a roof; earlier in the presentation he said the committee room would likely require about eight units. The company provided testing references, including work "through Elite Electronics Laboratories in Chicago" and cited historical EMP examples such as a 1962 high-altitude test that affected Hawaii and a 1989 solar storm that knocked out power in Quebec.

Mazarin framed the threat in three components: E1 (a very fast, high-voltage pulse often associated with a nuclear detonation), E2 and E3 (lower-energy, slower pulses including solar events). "An EMP pulse overwhelms everything that we own electronically," Mazarin said, and he told the committee his product is intended to protect assets such as data centers, airports, banks and key buildings rather than every individual home.

Committee members questioned the limits, costs and detection. "Can this system actually detect EMP pulses, like, maybe before they start or as they're starting?" asked Representative Menser, the committee's minority vice chair. Mazarin replied, "An EMP pulse itself, there's really no way detecting it until after it happens," but added his units include metering to record the magnitude of a pulse after it occurs. He told members the Department of Defense is installing Faraday cages — heavy, expensive enclosures — and contrasted what he called a lower-cost and more immediately deployable unit; he estimated a Faraday cage for a small building could cost about $4,000,000, while saying his product installations could be in the low hundreds of thousands of dollars per site depending on scale and configuration.

Representatives also asked about known ranges for man-made EMP devices. Mazarin said, "For the devices that we're aware of, we know that they're mobile. We know that they're small. And we know that they could actually shoot a pulse a couple miles from other target." He declined to provide classified details about specific incidents when asked.

Members repeatedly raised that statewide protection at residential scale would be impractical; Mazarin and members agreed the focus should be on hardened critical infrastructure such as hospitals, banks and fuel and communications nodes. "We need the banking. We need the hospitals," Mazarin said, adding that protecting assets would help recovery once systems could be rebuilt.

The committee approved the Oct. 22 meeting minutes by unanimous consent after Representative Conlan moved to approve. The committee then heard additional questions, thanked the presenter and adjourned.

The presentation included several technical claims and numerical examples provided by Mazarin and attributed in the company's testing; committee members asked for additional technical detail and follow-up with staff and the presenter on next steps.