Imagine for a moment that you are preparing to make your emergency rounds at 7 PM in the evening. It is just beginning to get dark and when last listening to the police scanner you noted some suspicious activities along your route. You don your proper gear and get ready to embark upon your task when all of a sudden the telephone system goes dead. You no longer have your primary means of communicating with other team members.

Whether you are participating in a practice drill or experiencing a real life emergency situation the lose of telephone communications can be devastating. When such an event occurs it is vital that you have some sort of backup plan prepared to place in motion.

Suppose that your city is now in the middle of a possible dam breaking or flooding is imminent. Not having a means of contacting the emergency essential members of your team can often times be fatal.

Let's for a moment take a training session from the professional planners and consider how the Town's Emergency Actions Managers would handle this problem. For the sake of simplicity let's say that a major telephone exchange has just been damaged or even blown up as a result of local terrorist activities. They would of course still have some communications facilities however they would be severely limited in their nature. We as survivalists should also look at our telephone outage in the same light - limited in capability but not completely wiped out. After all we still have walkie-talkie capability; we have cell phones and even two way radios.

The major hurdle in all this planning is that we must ensure that each member of our team has the same capabilities and has been trained in the proper procedures needed to accomplish the mission.

Does each team member know to instinctively turn on their cell phone or two way radio when they fail to make contact with their main command center? Are they familiar with the frequencies that they should use to make initial contact? Will the equipment that you have for use as a backup be capable of the distances that must be covered? Are there dead spots in your city or town where wireless telephone service would be useless?

These are questions that must be considered and it would be to every survival group's benefit to bring up these and similar questions during your next survivalist meeting. Don't take chances on being caught without communications as in most situations the problem can be critical.

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