Phone service is only reliable if you don't get trees across the phone lines. This is very common in rural and near-rural areas.

In smaller suburban towns--and most rural areas--many people still have wells, which will fail as soon as the power goes out.

The reliability of electrical power varies considerably. Where I currently live in Vermont, my neighbors say they can't remember a power outage longer than an hour or two--and they've been living in the same house since childhood.

But when I lived in Maine, we had a multi-day power outage every few years. Some of our neighbors lost power for two weeks after Hurricane Gloria.

I haven't lived through this kind of infrastructure failure in 15 years or so--just enough time to get complacent. None of this is very hard to cope with if you take the right steps in advance.