Sorry, i couldn't think of a better title. Because I live on the west coast and have family in the midwest and east coast, I've been thinking about how we would communicate and/or reunite if some sort of disaster disrupted power, conventional communication, etc., especially for an extended period. I don't even want to think about how i would communicate with my relatives in europe. I know the likelihood of something like this happening is very low, but the thought of not being able to communicate with family/friends is disturbing. It seems having a plan in place, even a very basic plan like how long to wait, and who will attempt to reach who, is important. How many of you have similar situations with family/relatives living far away and do you have a plan in place?

Re: Reunification and Communication Plans

I think that we have to look at what sort of communications disaster you are talking about.

A localized power outage affecting a city for example. Usually this power outage would normally be resolved within hours to days and would not generally affect the mobile/cellular phone network unless the cellular network towers had also been affected with power outages. If the normal PSTN network has also gone down, then most people would naturally begin to use their cell phones for voice communications. The resulting congestion would make communications difficult. Therefore sending text messages would have a much more likely hood of being sent because of the reduced bandwidth requirements a text message would require. If this fails then attempt to send the text message again at 04:00am when most people are asleep. A solar charger for your phone would be useful to keep the charge on the phone topped up as one of the first priorities for the authorities would be to re-establish the cellular network. Leaving your mobile switched on for that period, it could lose its battery charge.

If the power outages were more widespread, say effecting much larger areas of the country for longer periods i.e. periods greater than 1 week then communications begin to become much more difficult. We now move onto the Global satellite (Iridium) phone type systems. If this fails to work and your GPS also has problems getting a signal then you should begin to worry as there has probably been a space war between the US, China and Russia or a large solar event or a nearby Super Nova, which has destroyed most of the orbiting satellites communications systems. If it does work then the chances of getting through to Europe will probably be better than the central or eastern United States for various reasons (most European telephone networks are a bit more robust than in the US) unless of course your family members elsewhere also have a Sat phone.

If the satellite phone fails then we can move onto the next technology which would be the shortwave radio transceiver sited at both your and your relatives locations respectively. This time around though getting through to central and eastern United States would be more probable. If this fails to work then one or two things have happened. Your SW transceiver electronics have been fried due to an EMP attack (even more worrying as it would appear the space war has been a lot more serious) or the Heaviside Appleton layer of the atmosphere has been affected. (even more worrying because most of the earths radio communications have probably been affected by the astronomic event). To get around the EMP type scenario try getting a SW transceiver which works using old fashioned tube technology.



British Amateur HF transceiver Heathkit HW101

If the Heaviside Appleton layer has been affected therefore not allowing SW transmissions or don't have a Sat phone or SW transceiver then it may be time to start the lost forgotten art of Writing a Letter and sending via the Postal Service. If there is no postal service then you or your family elsewhere would probably be advised to stay where they were unless of course you or you relatives life's depended on moving elsewhere. If the Postal Service is unavailable then the US government is also unavailable to do much either.

In an extended event, one of the things you should do is check in with the Red Cross, and possibly the Salvation Army. I believe the Red Cross maintains a list of displaced persons, and facilitates reconnection. Also, find your friendly local amateur radio operator. Passing messages like this is one of the things we do.

"...destroyed most of the orbiting satellites communications systems..."

If satellites are taken out, I fear that communication with friends and relatives would be the least of our worries. No satellites means that you can not buy fuel at most/all gas stations, and it might mean that you can not even buy a burger at McD's, or a six pack at your local stop 'n rob. Seems that their computer systems, which they need to be able to run their cash registers/ordering systems, are tied into sat's somehow. If that were to happen, bad things, a lot of bad things, would start, and only get worse with time. In that case, we might have to hire Kevin Costner to be The Postman...

Don't forget internet/e-mail. There have been plenty of times when phone calls were not possible due to downed long distance lines or busy switches but the internet will take a different route so if a circuit is down going from the eestern US to Europe then the route may have to to Europe via the Eastern US and take a little lobger but eventually get there. Vioce systems don't re-route like that.
HAM radio is also an option, even if you and your realtives don't have a HAM license and radio you may be able to contact an ARES (and whatever the Europe equiv. is) and have them relay a message for you.

Re - Eugene

If you have access to a Cable Broadband connection you can use Voice over IP (VOIP). This will route the voice call over the IP network in the same way as normal IP Internet traffic. If there is a local power outage you may not be able to keep your modem and PC running. I would recommend a VOIP capable cable Router with a Uninterruptible Power Supply to allow the router to maintaining your Broadband connection and hence the ability to use VOIP telephone calls. Using a decent UPS to power the VOIP router would give 12-24hrs use. Whether there was a UPS at the other end of the cable is another matter.

EDIT

I've just seen a BBC report about the 25th Anniversary of the Argentine invasion of the Falkland Islands. It reported that the first the UK government knew of the invasion was a report from a local farmer in Port Stanley, who was a radio HAM enthusiast, reporting the invasion to the BBC radio HAM club in Central London. The BBC reporter then informed an official at the Foreign Office who then informed the Prime Minister then Parliament. Short Wave radio still has its place!!

This is a very incomplete answer, but one particular idea that struck me about both immediate and long-term communications is the value of a cell phone. A cellular system can become jammed up in the initial phases of any disaster and also get knocked out, but once things have settled down, most newer cell phones give you multiple options to stay in touch--voice, text messaging, email, instant messaging. Granted, all these services go through the wireless provider, but the provider will likely be trying to hard to get things running and stay running, as much as any landline provider. One thing that Katrina taught me was that it can be easy to be displaced from your home or have the home destoryed, so any fixed means of communication, like a landline or postal mail, may be useless so we can take advantage of the roaming capabilities of a cell phone to stay in touch no matter where we end up.

If you can maintain power to your phone, maybe using a car charger or some external power source, like a Charge2Go or Sidewinder, you'll have a means to stay in touch. Probably not 100% reliable, but at least you'll have a chance, even if you're on the move. For those Katrina families that got separated and didn't have any common number to call--I wonder how long it took some families to find each other when the members were moved from shelter to shelter and eventually shipped off to different states?

It's a good thing that people remember, no matter if you have a communications plan or not, that in the first hours or even days of many major events, there will likely be no communications for various reasons, so they should expect that and should not try repeatedly to call into a disaster area.

I, too, live on the West Coast and have family in the Midwest. Often, long distance still works even when you can't make a local call. (The SF police chief said he could call his brother in Hawaii, but not his wife at home during the phone outage of Loma Prieta - too many locals have their phones off the hook, trying to call loved ones.) I'd expect to be able to make a long distance call, and I'd expect my brother to be able to call in to my home number, if it's on the hook.

During a New York City black out, I read that people were using their cellphones to light up darkened building lobbies - they couldn't get a cell dial tone, but payphones still worked. Do you know where your payphones are? Got quarters?

Satellite phones should work as long as you have power. The last time I checked (last fall), a QualComm satphone could be had for $300 used, $500 refurbished, $645 new. That includes no time, not even an account. Buying a dial tone on a satellite phone is expensive. GlobalStar service plans (GlobalStar is the satellite that the QualComm uses) includes a $50 activation fee, and the cheapest is 50 minutes a month for $50 a month, with any minutes over your allowable number billed at a dollar each. Voicemail is an additional $7.95 a month. The early termination fee is $250 if you don't keep the service for a year.

Their cheapest airtime plan is $350 a year with no minutes. Use of the phone costs $1.49 per minute. The same early termination fee applies. In all plans, you pay per minute for incoming and outgoing calls. There are roaming fees for calls not originating and terminating in the US. I rent a satphone occasionally for camping trips where there is no cellphone and being stranded in winter weather is a possibility. The QualComm phone worked fine; an Iridium phone suffered from dropped calls. This is anecdotal, so I can't make a judgment on quality withhout more experience.

Based on the economics, I can't afford a satphone.

I have a general license for amateur radio and an HF transceiver, so I might be able to reach a ham in the Midwest (or where ever) to ask for a phone call at her expense to my family. Frankly, I'm less concerned about them knowing I'm okay than I am about knowing my wife here in the Bay Area is okay.

We have our own plan. We both have ham and GMRS licenses, and we carry a little card with us to remind us that we are to meet in one of two locations (if one is destroyed or unreachable, we use the secondary). We have our ham and GMRS radios programmed with our "personal" frequencies to communicate. We don't expect cellphones to work, so we don't have a plan that includes them. Local health and welfare takes priority over communications out of state. Meet up with my wife face to face or by radio to know we're both okay. Coordinate actual meeting and get to our stash at home for food & shelter.

If we are in a long term survival situation, which I would expect in a big earthquake just like big hurricanes in New Orleans, I would give my phone my first try at letting folks off the coast know we're okay, then give ham radio a try, and then use either Red Cross or Salvation Army's people for health and welfare traffic.

I live in a high traffic area, and lots of cars are parked on the street. With my siphon and Beil tool, I'll have gas and batteries for a long time, but that's a very last resort, as some people might take offense to having their car peeled. I can power and recharge my radios off car batteries, so I could be able transmit on my own for some time, assuming my radios and antennas are in working order.

Get a analog telephone in order to make calls. Local calls use two circuits but long distance use just one. Use text msgs either with cell phone or internet-less bandwidth usage.

Give one or two trusted people who live out of state your important numbers of relatives and very close friends. You contact the trusted numbers and they can call the rest.

SMS might be worth looking into.

http://www.wired.com/science/discoveries/news/2001/02/41621

Hmm, I wonder how many metropolitan areas even have analog cellular service anymore? I don't know, but I wouldn't be surprised if it is quite a small number by now. Just curious, jmacclau, but do you currently use an analog phone? If yes, are you in a rural area?

Even TDMA is an endangered species. Cingular is trying to dump its legacy TDMA network it acquired from AT&T as quickly as it can. It costs a lot of money to maintain two separate networks.

Cold Equations time.

If it is bad and they are that far away, write them off. You'll have more to do than worry about them, and after a week or so, they won't be showing up. Either they'll be out of gas and cash somewhere in the middle, dug in at home, or dead.

If they show up, great, celebrate. But unless you yourself can directly influence their ability to reach your location, there is nothing you can do. If they aren't within a few hundred miles, realistically they'll never get there it is very bad.

As for your European relatives, it there is a long term communication breakdown, they might as well be be in a different solar system.

I hate to sound mean or cold. But in a scenario so significant that there is a long term disruption of communication and trade, you can not help them. You can't change the weather either, only deal with it.

Re Ironraven



I don't really understand that assumption. Is it that most people in the United States assume that International telephone calls are made using Satellite communications. Most calls from the US to Europe use very robust and reliable submarine cables. These cables were first laid under the North Atlantic over 100 years ago by the United Kingdom. The rest of the world was connected up in a similar way, all the way through the middle east through India and Australia. A sort of World Wide Web for the British Empire. At the moment there is huge voice / data capacity under the Atlantic via submarine cables. In fact if there was a wide power outage across the world, someone in New York will probably have more success calling Edinburgh rather than Los Angles. It might be that the LA call from New York may have to be made the long way around.

Depending on where you are the phone service isn't all that reliable. I've reported both phone and power outages via the internet with my laptop and cable modem running from battery and apparently the other end on battery as well. Were in an area which used to be Ameritech, then SBC then AT&T and my phone lines are dead more than they work. We use our cell phones for most calls anymore.
I stick with Verizon cellular, even though they are more expensive they work in more places than anyone else and I always buy a tri mode phone which means it can do analog and have fallen back on analog calls more than once.

If I can't call 8 miles away, I'm pretty sure 8 time zones away it out of service to. If it stays out of service for a prolonged period, I'm going to forget about you all over there.

It might be a good idea to find out who your local HAM operators are, and become acquainted.

If you really do need to get a message out of the area, they may be willing to help you. Or not. If your problem is relatively local, siphon a gallon or two of gas out of your car (or someone else's), and pay them a cautious visit. If they have a generator, they may be able and willing. Have your contacts (one or two, not twenty) and their phone numbers written down, as well as the message. Make the deal, hand them the note, hand them the gas, say 'thank you' and leave.

If there's reasonable chance that they will do as you requested, realize that they aren't going to want you in their home, hanging over their shoulder and waiting for them to actually make the contact.

Sue

Thanks everyone, really good information here. I suppose unless its a disaster/event that means TEOTWAWKI, long distance communication will be possible, though it might require some patience and a little creative thinking. I did some searching and was surprised to find that there actually is an emergency auxiliary communications service (ACS) made up of volunteer HAM operators coordinated by the LA City Fire Dept. I had no idea something like that existed here but its good to know. Of course, as OldBaldGuy said, its reassuring to know that if all else fails we can always hire kevin costner.

As of Feb 2008, Analog Cell Service will cease in most places:

http://news.com.com/2100-1039_3-6143866.html
"While most U.S. cities are blanketed with advanced cell phone service at least four times over, huge patches of rural America still don't have cell phone coverage. What's more, the problem could get worse before it gets better when rules requiring carriers to offer older, analog service expire early in 2008."


Effects include knocking out 10% of OnStar subscribers:
http://www.tmcnet.com/usubmit/2007/03/30/2454117.htm

Thats why I said internet/e-mail the / is sort of an either/or

I'm thinking jmacclau was probably meaning a POT (Plain Old Telephone) as in corded home phone which can still work in a power outage since all the teloco stuff runs from battery.

Is it worth finding out where your local cell phone towers are, with the idea of moving around if the nearest ones are knocked out? Is it worth having two or more phones with subscriptions to different networks - preferable ones that don't share the same local towers? You may find that one operator gets back on line quicker than another.

It might, particularly in sparsely covered areas. In a more densely covered region, there would be so many towers to make note of, it might be easier to just walk around a bit in search of a signal. If you live in a densely covered area, that also means that it's a densely populated area, and the cell towers will likely be overloaded with callers during some crisis situation anyway, so it might not help too much in the end to know where towers are located. So many people will be wandering around looking for a signal that all the nearby operational towers will likely be overwhelmed anyway.

An alternative might be to think of tall buildings or hilltops that you might use to try and hit more distant cell towers in case the ones in your vicinity are inoperable. You may be able to reach a more distant tower without actually having to move very far from your location, if you can just get up higher.

Having two phones using two networks would provide you some redundancy, although at added expense. You often hear comments from people after disasters, like major hurricanes, that carrier X was totally down while carrier Y was always on, so the idea has merit. In Europe, I guess you could accomplish the same thing by simply swapping the SIM cards between carriers. I hear a lot of people who travel between countries there routinely pop in different SIM cards depending on where they are, to get the lowest rates, so it's not a new idea for them, and you wouldn't have to worry about keeping two separte phones charged up all the time, in preparation of some disaster.

This is a great thread.

Our (my wife and I) have a plan that comprises a few different levels using text messaging/email if the phones are out, CB and ham radio, and GMRS radios. We have several places to meet within 30 miles of home...state parks to our south, east, and west. Lake Erie is just north. Does anyone else think that a state park may be a good place to meet? Anyone think it's a bad idea?

We also have friends' houses in other states we'd meet at if the situation warranted, and those friends are also our out-of-state contacts.

Funny you should mention a state park as a meeting point. I've always thought that a state/national park would make a great retreat. Depending on location of course, you could have plenty of water from multiple sources (rivers, lakes, wells), plenty of wood to cook/boil water with, and i doubt that would be many people's choice of refuge should a major disruption occur.

As a meeting place, maybe access could be a problem. Depending on the kind of situations you're thinking of, things like flooding might be more likely on the way to a wildnerness area than around town, perhaps making it harder to meet up safely or in a timely manner.

Oh, the residents that live around the park may be very friendly and helpful, but then again, they may be very suspicious or even hostile to "outsiders". Even the authorities may be this way. I'm sure that I'm not the only one who read news stories of some people fleeing the flooding in New Orleans, only to be turned back by police roadblocks at the border of neighboring parishes. It's possible that roads to state parks will be blocked off by the park rangers to prevent people from escaping there. If I were in charge of a state park, I guess I would be nervous of having all these people "running loose" in the park after some disaster, not knowing how long the situation will last.

As a place to stay put rather than just meet, it may not be the best place for people/families who are not equipped or experienced to live outdoors. Or maybe you're fine, but other people are dumb about using fire and start a wildfire or don't think of sanitation and end up excessively polluting the water for everyone else. And if you get in trouble, like get caught in rain and someone is going into hypothermia, then you're just that much farther from any sort of help than if you were closer to civillization.

Once the authorities are able to get things semi-organized, like send out water tankers and relief supplies, set up aid stations, send police/National Guard troops, etc., state parks probably are not on their list of locations to support unless there are a lot of people there with you.

Another totally random thought that just came to mind--marijuana plots and meth labs. A rare but pervasive problem in some parks. If people start pushing into deeper areas to get away from crowds, then there's the chance of stumbling onto one of these encampments. Even if the occupants aren't around and armed, there could still be booby traps and dangerous chemical contamination.

Anyway, some random thoughts.

Towers are all shared, usually they are not owned by the cell phone company rather they are owned by someone else who leases the space to them so typically the different carriers are all one the same tower.
Also not all carriers use use SIM cards, Verizon for example doesn't

The larger state and national parks have their own security people, they could be closed in the event of something major. I'm not sure what would be a good meeting place though. Any kind of shopping center/grocery store is going to be crowded as people rush to it to buy beer, yes, I went to the store once before a big "disaster" was to hit and 95% of the people had carts with nothing but beer.

Yes; and you can get Pay As You Go SIMs which don't have running costs if you don't use them. (You need to use them once every six months or else risk losing the number.)

Having a spare phone is relative easy now - a matter of keeping the old phone when you upgrade. Lithium Ion batteries should keep their charge will enough that a check every 6-12 months should do.