So wrong! If you have a ham lisence and the needed gear (which isn't expensive if you go CW QRP) there will never be a time other than during a severe electrical storm when you cannot make contact outside you local area by a wide margin. on 40 meters in cw under 5 watts you could easily reach around the horizon. There will be vhf and uhf and occasionally 10 meter frequencies that are "taken over" by the emergency communications nets but with a ham lisence you have access to HUGE amounts of bandwidth. Move over a few kilohertz and you will find a quiet channel to transmit on without bothering anyone. If you are involved in the ARES / RACES programs in your area you will know ahead of time what frequencies they are on and you can arrange to use otherones for your personal / group comms. With this pre-arranged and a bit more money you can place a repeater somewhere convenient on your personal frequency and have decent local VHF coverage during emergencies in FM mode. I doubt that there will ever be a localized emergency that comes close to the communications load represented by field-day and even on field day you could make contact on just about any frequency with just about anyone within 1/2 hour if you are persistent enough.

The trick with using the ham bandwidth and gear for personal comms in an emergency is pre-arrainging the frequencies and times when you and your group will be listening. You need to setup a couple of frequencies so that if there is chatter on the one you first listen on you can switch over. You will need to pre-arrange with your group when to listen and in what order to switch between the prearranged frequencies. With a decent mobil rig at either end you can even setup a scan group to include only the prearranged frequencies. As loong as those aren't the ones that ARES will be using you will be GTG.