In an emergency, everything becomes local. You see an accident or a fire, get a Watch Duty alert, receive an evacuation notification — how do you quickly tell your neighbors? Or something bad has happened and you need to know if people are okay, need help, or are missing?
The key challenge is that people are scattered — some at home, some at work or school, some traveling — and you don’t know which ways of reaching them will work. You’ll need to try a couple of approaches. Things must be simple enough that anyone in the neighborhood can step into this role.
Notifying Your Neighbors
Start with a neighborhood directory so you know who to contact and how. Here are the approaches, roughly in order of preference:
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Email list — Reliable and easy to manage. Use Google Groups or groups.io. This is guaranteed to reach everyone, but can be slow because people don’t check their email very often.
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SMS/text messages — While cell phone towers lose power after 24 hours, text messages over internet can be very reliable. With the advent of RCS it is possible to build texting lists with large quantities of users that work with any modern iPhone or Android phone. While the lists are little fragile, and rarely reach the whole neighborhood, people check text messages constantly and hence this technique reaches those on the list almost instantly. This is the fastest way of reaching the mostest.
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WhatsApp group — Widely used in disaster response worldwide. Works with any phone, easier to manage than SMS, more robust than regular texts. Requires working internet.
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Phone tree — Traditional approach using designated call leaders. Increasingly difficult as landlines disappear, and the weak link is a group lead who may be unreachable.
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GMRS/MURS radio — If neighbors have radios and they’re on, this is fast and requires no internet or cell service. SSEPO provides grants to help neighborhoods get equipped.
Recommendation: Build email and texting lists first. Try those in an emergency. If you have GMRS radios, use those too. If none of that works, ask neighbors you’ve reached to physically check on others.
For welfare checks (not just broadcasting information), use a copy of the directory to track who’s been reached.
Calling for Help
If your neighborhood needs to report casualties or missing people:
- Always try 911 first
- Use GMRS radio to reach neighbors — see GMRS/MURS frequencies
- Use Ham radio to reach the fire department DOC directly — see the Emergency Comm Plan
Preparation
- Build your neighborhood directory
- Create email and texting lists
- Get GMRS radios and practice using them
- Identify the Ham radio operators in your neighborhood
- Join the regional drills to practice all of this