When I first moved to the Santa Cruz Mountains, my house came with a small gas-powered generator and a manual transfer switch for the key electrical circuits. The seller warned me that the power went out regularly in the winter, owing to the many, many trees that fall and the ensuring havoc they wreck on the power lines, combined with the fact that a road that has – maybe, 50 residents – is not usually a priority for PG&E.

Fast forward a few years, and after some of the catastrophic Northern California wildfires that were likely sparked by PG&E equipment in wildland/urban interface areas, the utility now has a hair-trigger for the Public Safety Power Shutoffs (PSPS) events every summer. These range from a day or two to over a week.

When the power goes out, many people lose internet access immediately. That also means they lose the VoIP service that has become so popular. In less than a day, depending on cell service provider, the battery backups for the cell sites go down, rendering cell phones useless. In most of the South Coast of San Mateo County and much of the Santa Cruz Mountains, the terrain makes cell service impossible without a very nearby cell tower that is powered and operational.

All of this makes emergency communication difficult. Most landlines will still work — unless the outage is due to tree damage, which often also takes out the telephone lines. If that’s the case, many homes are left without any modern means of communicating an emergency to the county dispatch center.

The solution? Amateur radio.

When our small town experiences an outage of any length, or a pre-planned outage, the fire department emergency operations center (EOC) is activated. And unlike a lot of urban EOCs, ours is staffed not by a bunch of brass in white shirts, but by a pair of civilian volunteers from the local amateur radio club and potentially a volunteer firefighter. They institute a controlled radio net on our local emergency service amateur repeaters and staff a VHF/UHF amateur radio station 24 hours a day at the fire house. From there, they can receive calls for service and relay those calls via phone to the county dispatch center. If the telephone link to the county center goes down, the ham radio operators can even page the firefighters manually to respond to the station. A number of our firefighters are also licensed hams with radios capable of communicating on both the public safety frequencies and the amateur bands, giving them a variety of communication options in truly dire emergencies. (I’ve personally had to respond to an fire call, and used the amateur repeater and EOC volunteers to notify my family where I was and how to reach me – via ham radio – if there was an issue at home.)

In my “day job,” I work for a major metropolitan police department. We have a modern, digital, trunked radio system with several layers of redundancy if we experience failures in an emergency. In the event of the most catastrophic failure, however, the final failsafe is still amateur radio volunteers, spread throughout the city, to provide communication via amateur radio bands and repeaters.

Amateur radio operators are fond if saying that when all else fails, ham radio works.

That’s true.

You can have the fanciest commercial or public safety communications system in the world, but when things go really bad, ham radio operators will still be able to throw some spare wire into a tree or hang it off a building, and communicate around the world with gear they can carry in a backpack. It’s one of the most critical, and under appreciated, disaster preparedness skillsets.