[27182818284]

I think shortwave (and a strong group of local hams ahead of time) is a possibly better approach

The hams in my area are routinely involved with disasters big and small. They've responded quickly in disasters with volunteer patrols and stations. They routinely help out at events like marathons, fairs, and more. When a fire took down a place's cell towers, they were there to facilitate communication. When the 911 call system went offline, they were around the city to help out (i.e., could place direct emergency calls for folks)

[Steltek]

Ehhh, I'm gonna have to disagree on the HF bit. Ham modes haven't kept up with the times: there needs to be a good and flexible HF packet system in place to enable scale. PACTORIII is proprietary garbage and Winlink seems to be just for email? And neither is very widespread anyway.

Short range, "walkie-talkie" stuff is fine but when you move up to the regional level, it's going to be a super bottleneck. Unfortunately, the majority of hams seem to be content to just do contesting using SSB or CW. There needs to be a huge, directed push to innovate here.

[LeoPanthera]

VHF or UHF to your local internet-connected repeater tower would work fine. It doesn't need to be HF.

Towers can have battery backup, and even in a wide-scale disaster, chances are one of them would maintain an internet connection.

[kalleboo]

HAMs are great but imagine if everyone had a shortwave transmitter after a disaster - if 4G networks can't handle the traffic, amateur radio would be pure noise. Getting wifi and mobile data working means everyone has a shot at communicating

[Steltek]

If you could funnel local traffic into more sparsely distributed HF packet-based transceivers, it might not be too bad. You wouldn't be relaying general Internet traffic, just disaster related info. Think 1990's web form for family contacts and medical status.

[monkmartinez]

We haven't had the need to use local HAM's in our emergency response system. I wonder though, are they trained on the incident command system(ICS)?

[wiml]

In the US at least there is ARES/RACES, and many cities/areas have some kind of liaison, periodic net checkins or drills, lightweight training, etc., so that hams can work effectively with the local incident response.

[ethanbond]

That'd be great for a subset of the reasons you might need actual data connectivity. Not sure you can download maps and whatnot over ham...