Comms, info, navigation

The page above lists the kit. This is about the two assumptions underneath it that have quietly stopped being true.

The network fades, it does not stop

Households plan for the mobile network being either up or down. It is neither.

Mobile base stations have battery backup, and it is measured in hours rather than days. Some sites have generators, most do not. So a long power failure does not switch the network off, it thins it out: the nearest mast goes first, calls start failing before data does, and coverage retreats toward the sites that have more resilience.

The practical consequence is that the first hour or two is worth more than the rest of the week put together.

1. Send the messages that matter immediately, before deciding whether it is serious. A text saying where you are and that you are fine costs nothing and may not be possible later.
2. Prefer text to voice. It needs a fraction of the capacity, it retries by itself, and it gets through congestion that defeats a call.
3. Charge everything now, off whatever is still charged, while you still know what the situation is.
4. Download while you can. The local council page, the weather, the map tile for your area. Anything you might want to read tomorrow, get today.
5. Then start conserving, because the plan is days rather than minutes. Turn the phone off between checks rather than leaving it hunting for a signal, which is what actually flattens a battery in poor coverage.

UK Emergency Alerts arrive on the mobile network too, so they are subject to exactly the same fade. They sound even on silent, which is the one useful thing about them, and they are one way: you cannot reply, and their absence is not evidence that nothing is happening.

The landline you think you have

The old copper telephone line worked in a power cut because the exchange powered the phone. That is being switched off.

UK landlines are migrating to voice over broadband, with the deadline extended to January 2027. A migrated line runs through your router, and your router needs mains power. So the fallback that generations of households have relied on, the corded phone in the hall that works when everything else does not, stops working in exactly the circumstances it was kept for.

Find out which you have, this week. If the phone plugs into the router rather than a socket on the wall, it is already migrated.

If it matters to your household, and it matters most where somebody is older, lives alone or depends on a care alarm, providers offer a battery backup unit to customers identified as vulnerable. It is worth asking for, and it is worth doing before rather than after.

A care alarm or pendant deserves a specific check, because many of them run over the same line and the same router, and the person wearing one is the least likely to notice it has stopped working.

Write the frequencies down now

Radio is the one channel that does not depend on the mobile network, which is why the parent page puts a wind-up set at the top of the list.

And a radio is useless if you cannot find the station. Nobody knows their local BBC frequency by heart, and the obvious way to look it up is the thing that has stopped working.

So write them on the card, in pen, today:

• BBC local radio for your county, FM and DAB. This is the designated emergency broadcaster and it is the one to find first.
• BBC Radio 4 on 92 to 95 FM and on 198 long wave, which carries a long way and from few transmitters.
• The council's number and website, and the water company's.
• Two neighbours, by name, number and house.

Tape the card inside the radio's battery cover, or in the drawer the radio lives in. A frequency remembered in the abstract is a frequency guessed at in the dark.

Why the contact is out of area

The parent page specifies an out-of-area contact on paper in every bag, and the reason is worth stating because it changes who you pick.

Local networks congest during local incidents. Everybody in the affected area rings everybody else at once, and the calls that do get through are often the ones going somewhere else. A relative two hundred miles away can usually be reached when the neighbour three streets over cannot, and they can then relay between family members who cannot reach each other directly.

So the out-of-area contact is a switchboard, not a rescuer. Pick somebody reliable, tell them that is the job, and make sure every person in the household has the number written down rather than only in a phone.

Agree the rally points properly. One just outside the house, for a fire. One outside the immediate area, for something bigger. Both written down, both walked to at least once, because a meeting point nobody has visited is a place people guess at.

Paper, and what to mark on it

An OS map of your area costs less than a takeaway and does not need charging. What makes it useful is what you write on it before anything happens.

• Water. Rivers, streams, ponds, and any spring or standing water within walking distance.
• The people on your card, with their houses marked.
• Two routes out, one on foot, avoiding the roads everyone else will use, and both crossing any river at a bridge you have actually looked at.
• The hospital, the pharmacy, the vet and the fire station.
• Where the ground floods, which local knowledge tells you and the map does not.
• Rally points, marked and dated.

Then use it once, in daylight, on an ordinary Saturday. A map you have navigated with is a tool. A map still in its wrapper is a decoration, and the difference only shows up when it is dark and raining.