We're in pretty similar places Martin - the thing that struck me about ham after I got my technician's ticket a couple years ago was, Boy, these guys are a couple decades behind. Second thought as I got more involved with some orgs designing their preparedness efforts for surivivability - particularly comms - was boy, we had better work to keep the wireless network available. With wireless we have SMS and text messaging, the possibility of cell voice traffic at least for those with priority. Without it we lose at least 99% of our responders, with no way to verify availability. The wireless folks have similar thoughts - they have rapid deployment forces to restore the network on a priority basis, generators attached to nodes nearest EOCs, basically they're doing the right things, but they're bounded by commercial interest, not so much by a true emergency signalling capability. I think the government needs to step in and support ($) that effort.

Anyway, they're working on the emergency comms plan in our local Red Cross chapter, and it relies on ham as the fallback - a decidedly last century fallback. I hope we can get folks up and running on some of the newer tools that would allow geolocation, so a central Ham operator at the EOC can at least track who is online and where, and which direction they are moving.