After Hurricane Lowell, Kauai could mostly make calls but barely get online, and in August some callers to the Bronx 911 center went unheard for seven hours. A family plan that does not depend on any one channel takes an evening: one out-of-state contact, plain texts, a walking route home, and a count of the medicine someone cannot go without.
Hurricane Lowell brushed Kauai in early September and left most of the island in the dark. Sixteen days later, the island's electric co-op reports 98 percent of its members back on. What happened to the phones is the more useful lesson. Beat of Hawaii, reporting from the island three days after the storm, found that voice calls had generally gone through while mobile data barely worked at all. Cable internet was broadly down. A fiber line never dropped, and satellite internet held up.
It is not only storms. On August 18, a software update to New York City's 911 system left call takers at the Bronx center unable to hear some callers for seven hours. About 70 percent of calls in that window connected normally, which is why nobody noticed until two call takers flagged the silent calls around 6 a.m. Of the 319 people affected, 206 reached help by calling back or being called back. 113 never got through, and the city never told the public.
Put those together and you have the rule for a family communication plan: any one channel can fail, quietly, so have a second one ready before you need it. The plan is four decisions you make tonight, while everything still works: who everyone checks in with, how to reach them when data is down, how everyone gets home, and what your household cannot run out of. FEMA's free fill-in form at ready.gov/plan-form turns the answers into a printable plan; keep a copy in every wallet and backpack.
Because after a disaster it can be easier to reach someone three states away than someone across town. FEMA's planning guide makes the point directly: when local lines jam, a long-distance call can still connect. So choose one relative or friend who lives outside your area, and make them the household's check-in point.
It also shrinks the problem. A family of four trying to reach each other is twelve calls into a jammed network, each person trying the other three. With one out-of-state contact it is four check-ins, and the contact passes the news along. Everyone needs that number, children included, and it should be written down: a dead phone takes its contacts with it, and almost nobody knows a number by heart anymore.
Then text, don't call. A text needs a fraction of the network a call does, and once it is sent the network keeps trying to deliver it. The catch is data. Messaging apps, iMessage's blue bubbles and email all need an internet connection, and mobile data is exactly what Kauai lost; a plain text message needs none. On an iPhone, make sure Send as Text Message is on in the Messages settings (Send as SMS on older versions) so a message falls back to a green-bubble text. In Google Messages the setting is Automatically resend as text, under RCS chats.
One exception: 911. The FCC's rule is call if you can, text if you can't. Text-to-911 is not available everywhere, and where it isn't, your phone gets an automatic reply telling you to call instead.
Emergencies do not wait for everyone to be home. Roads close, transit stops, gas pumps need power, and the car you drove to work may be the one thing you cannot use. MyPlann is built on riding out an emergency at home, so the first job is getting everyone there.
Do the arithmetic. An adult walks about three miles an hour on a clear sidewalk, slower in the dark or around debris, so a 12-mile commute is four hours on foot before any detour. Trace the route once on a paper map, mark an alternate around the likely choke points (bridges, rail crossings, underpasses that flood), and download the area for offline use. Google Maps and Apple Maps both do it, and on Kauai, data was the thing that failed.
Keep a small get-home kit where you spend the day: shoes you can walk miles in, water, a snack, a battery pack for your phone, a little cash, and the written card from the section above. If you have children, know the school's pickup rules. Schools generally release a child only to an adult on their list, so put someone who lives or works nearby on it.
Last, agree on one meeting spot right outside the house, a neighbor's porch or the end of the street, for the day you get home and cannot go in: a fire, the smell of gas, a tree through the roof. It takes a minute to decide, and it is the difference between waiting and searching.
Once everyone is home, the plan turns into a count of days, and for many households the shortest count is a medicine. The question is not whether it is a prescription. It is whether someone would be in real danger without it: blood thinners, insulin, and heart, seizure or breathing medicines, for example. Stool softeners, vitamins and most supplements matter for comfort, not for how long you can safely stay home. If you are not sure which is which, ask your doctor or pharmacist.
Count the ones that matter: pills on hand divided by pills per day, for each person who takes one. The smallest answer is your household's medicine number. Write each of those medicines, with its dose, on the family card as well; a pharmacist can do far more with a written list than with a description of a small white pill. Issue 31 covered how to build that supply ahead of time.
Then do the same division for water, food and cooking fuel, the way Issue 35 laid out, and the smallest number of all is how long your household can really stay home. The communication plan gets everyone there. The count tells you how long home can hold them.
Phones, power and stores down at the same time is the Grid Down scenario. MyPlann counts your household's days from what is actually on your shelves, including the medicines someone cannot go without, and tells you which shortage ends them first.
MyPlann maps your real preparedness level against every scenario in this brief — and shows you exactly what to address first. Free during early access.
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