I’m a ham radio operator of decades, the radio comms lead for my CERT, and a member of a local amateur radio club primarily focused on supporting our local first responders.

Where I live and work, there’s no good way to use a two-way radio to reach first responders directly. Your best bet is to reach someone else, most often an amateur radio operator, who has telephone service available.

Some radios will reach first responders directly on their own frequencies, if programmed for that. Please don’t even think about doing that unless the situation is life or death and you don’t have another way that will work to reach help. It’s illegal because amateur handhelds are not type accepted for use on public service radio frequencies, because amateurs are not licensed to transmit on those frequencies, and because if the first responders decide to charge you with interfering with their use of the frequencies you could end up with serious criminal liability.

I recommend that if you’re serious about being ready for a communications emergency you should get an amateur radio license.

While hard to program without a cable and software and limited in output power, the Baofeng UV5R is inexpensive and very flexible in its capabilities.