Part of our Emergency Communications and Preparedness pillar
I have written about a lot of individual disaster scenarios on this site, and I kept hearing the same thing: people wanted one place to find all of it instead of hunting through a dozen separate posts. So here it is. Every scenario-specific comms plan I have written, combined into a single reference, with the stuff they all have in common covered once at the top instead of repeated eleven times.
What Is Common to Every One of These Plans
Every scenario below assumes the same foundation. Instead of repeating it eleven times, here it is once.
- Your general PACE communications plan (Primary, Alternate, Contingency, Emergency) is the starting point for all of this. If you do not have one yet, Building a PACE Communications Plan for Grid-Down Scenarios covers how to set it up.
- Radios stay charged and pre-programmed with local repeaters and simplex frequencies as a standing habit, not something you scramble to do once a warning is already out.
- A family rally point and a check-in schedule, agreed on in advance, not negotiated over the radio mid-event. The 3-3-3 radio plan is a simple, repeatable structure for this, and the key parts of a SHTF communications plan covers rally points and roles in more depth.
- A NOAA Weather Radio with SAME encoding is your baseline alert layer regardless of which scenario you are dealing with. It does not need a license, a working repeater, or anyone else being on the air.
- None of this replaces 911 or official evacuation guidance. Radio supports your household plan, it does not substitute for emergency services or the people whose job is assessing the actual danger.
- Write the plan down. A one-page reference every family member can find without you there to explain it beats a plan that only lives in your head. See documenting your SHTF communications plan.
With that covered, here is how each specific scenario changes things. Jump to the one you need:
- Wildfire Evacuation
- Monsoon or Flash Flood
- Winter Storm and Extended Power Outage
- Hurricane or Tropical Storm
- Earthquake
- Tornado Warning
- House Fire Emergency
- Power Grid Cyberattack
- Pandemic or Extended Quarantine
- Chemical Spill or Hazmat Evacuation
- Civil Disturbances or Large-Scale Events
Wildfire Evacuation
Wildfire season here in Arizona is not an abstract prepper scenario, it is a real seasonal risk. Unlike a hurricane, where you typically get days of warning, a wildfire can go from a distant column of smoke on the news to a mandatory evacuation order in under an hour.
Fire moves at the speed of wind, and wind is unpredictable. A reverse-911 alert or a sheriff’s deputy going door to door might be your only warning, and it might arrive with almost no lead time. Whoever gets that warning first needs to be able to reach everyone else in a single transmission using words the whole family already knows.
Cell towers lose power or get overwhelmed by call volume the moment a fire threatens a populated area, often well before the fire itself reaches anything. If your entire evacuation plan lives inside a group text thread, you have no plan the moment towers go down or congest. This is exactly the gap GMRS and ham radio exist to fill.
Your wildfire rally point needs to sit outside the fire’s likely path, decided in advance, not negotiated over the radio while smoke is visible from your window. Keep a laminated copy of your plan in every vehicle, not just the go-bag, since you may not be leaving from home when the order comes.
Monsoon or Flash Flood
Monsoon season brings a different kind of fast-moving hazard than wildfire. A flash flood does not just threaten your house, it can reshape the roads you were counting on to get out.
A wash that was bone dry an hour ago can become impassable in minutes, and it can stay that way long after the rain itself has stopped. Your plan needs to account for routes disappearing entirely, not just being slower than usual.
It is common for one vehicle in a family to make it across a crossing before it floods and another not to, splitting the group in a way a wildfire evacuation usually does not. Your plan needs a way for separated vehicles to reconnect, not just a single shared destination everyone assumes they will reach together.
Your wildfire rally point is probably uphill and away from vegetation. Your flood rally point needs to be on high ground reachable without crossing a wash, which may rule out the same location entirely. Pick it specifically for this hazard. SkyWarn spotting exists for exactly this kind of lead-time monitoring, giving you enough warning to move before roads close.
Winter Storm and Extended Power Outage
Most of the scenarios here assume you need to move. A winter storm knocking out power for days is the opposite problem. Nobody is evacuating, everyone is just stuck at home, cold, and increasingly cut off, and that changes what your plan actually needs to do.
A plan built around a quick evacuation check-in does not automatically scale to a multi-day outage. You need a schedule people can sustain without burning out, and a realistic sense of how long you can keep this up before something has to change.
During a short event, your radio’s battery draw barely registers. During a multi-day outage, you are also running lights, maybe a space heater, and keeping phones charged off the same limited battery bank. Decide in advance what gets priority, because figuring that out on day three of no power is a bad time to start rationing.
Roads may be genuinely dangerous during an ice storm in a way they are not during most other disasters, which makes radio check-ins more valuable than usual for confirming an elderly neighbor or relative is actually okay without anyone having to drive over and risk it. Run a mock outage for a full day at least once before winter, radios only, no cell phone as a backup crutch. It is the only way to find your actual battery runtime.
Hurricane or Tropical Storm
Hurricanes are one of the few disasters you usually see coming days in advance, which means this plan should be built around that lead time rather than treated as a scramble once the storm is already bearing down. I do not operate in hurricane country myself, but the planning principles here come straight from how ARES and Skywarn groups in coastal and Gulf states structure their approach, and they translate directly regardless of where you live.
Charge every battery, radio, and power bank as soon as a storm enters the forecast cone, not when landfall is imminent. Many hurricane-prone areas run dedicated hurricane nets on HF, the Hurricane Watch Net on 14.325 MHz is the most well known, that activate as storms approach.
Repeaters on generator or battery backup can and do stay up through a storm, but assume they might not, especially as flooding or wind damage extends beyond a single site’s backup runtime. HF, especially NVIS-style operation on 40 and 80 meters, becomes genuinely valuable here since it does not depend on any local infrastructure at all.
Post-landfall, expect commercial cell infrastructure to be degraded or down for days, sometimes weeks, in the hardest hit areas. This is when Winlink becomes valuable for sending health and welfare traffic out of an area with no working internet. If you are not actively part of an organized net, the best thing you can do is stay off frequencies being used for served-agency traffic and coordinate with your own family and neighbors on a pre-agreed simplex or GMRS frequency instead.
A hurricane comms plan is really just your general plan with a specific, well-forecasted trigger. The lead time hurricanes give you means there is no excuse for dead batteries or unprogrammed radios when the storm actually arrives.
Earthquake
Earthquakes are the opposite of a hurricane from a planning standpoint. There is no multi-day forecast cone, no landfall countdown, and often no meaningful warning at all beyond a few seconds from an early warning system in areas that have one. Your plan has to already be muscle memory before the ground ever moves, because you will not get advance notice to charge batteries or review anything.
Unlike a hurricane where damage is concentrated along a storm track, earthquake damage can be widespread and unpredictable, hitting cell towers, repeater sites, and power infrastructure simultaneously across a large area with no clear pattern. Aftershocks compound the problem by threatening already-weakened repeater sites and structures for days or weeks after the main event.
Your rally point and check-in protocol matter even more here, since earthquake damage frequently overwhelms cell networks through sheer call volume even where towers survive. Earthquakes are also one of the more common triggers for a real, sustained ARES activation supporting served agencies.
Resist the urge to immediately key up and start asking questions on the local repeater in the first minutes after a significant quake. Everyone else has the same instinct, and a repeater flooded with “is everyone okay” traffic makes it harder for actual emergency and served-agency communications to get through. Check on your own household and immediate neighbors first using GMRS or simplex, then listen to the repeater before transmitting.
Because earthquakes give you no warning, your earthquake plan is really a test of whether your everyday preparedness habits are actually good enough.
Tornado Warning
A tornado plan lives on a completely different timescale than a hurricane plan. You are working with minutes, sometimes less, not days. This is not a scenario for figuring out your plan in the moment. Everything here needs to already be set up and second nature before severe weather season starts.
Before you think about your ham gear, make sure you have a dedicated NOAA Weather Radio with SAME encoding programmed for your county, sitting somewhere it will actually wake you up regardless of what else is happening in the house. This is the cheapest, most reliable piece of your entire severe weather plan, and your ham radio is a supplement to this, not a replacement for it.
Skywarn nets activate on local repeaters during severe weather, with trained spotters relaying ground truth observations directly to the National Weather Service. Even if you never spot yourself, know your local Skywarn net frequency and stay off it during an active activation unless you have something genuinely relevant to report.
Damage from a tornado is often narrow but severe, a few blocks of total destruction next to areas with no damage at all. This makes local, immediate communication more valuable than long-range HF in the first hours. Know your safe room or shelter location before severe weather season starts, and keep a battery or hand-crank radio there, not in a closet elsewhere in the house.
House Fire Emergency
I want to be direct about something before I get into this section: if your house is actively on fire, your radio is not the priority. Getting everyone out and calling 911 on a phone is the priority. This section is about where radio genuinely fits around a house fire emergency, not a suggestion that it replaces the basics.
The most realistic use case is coordinating with family members who are not all in the same part of the house or property when a fire starts, especially if you have a larger property, outbuildings, or family members outside checking on livestock or vehicles while others are evacuating the main structure. A GMRS or ham handheld lets everyone confirm they are out and accounted for without depending on cell service, which matters because a house fire can damage your home’s WiFi router and any cell signal boosters almost immediately.
A programmable scanner covering your local fire and police dispatch frequencies can give you situational awareness once you are safely out, letting you understand what responding units are seeing and doing without tying up a 911 line asking for updates.
Radio’s role in a house fire is narrow and specific: coordinating a fast household evacuation and staying informed while safely outside. Smoke detectors, a working fire extinguisher, and a pre-planned evacuation route matter more than any radio you own.
Power Grid Cyberattack
Grid cyberattack scenarios get a lot of dramatic attention in preparedness circles, and I want to address this one carefully, separating genuine risk from the more exaggerated doomsday framing that shows up online.
Documented grid cyberattacks, like those affecting parts of Ukraine’s power infrastructure in past years, have caused regional, hours-to-days-long outages, not the instant, nationwide, months-long collapse that some preparedness content implies. Grid operators have real redundancy, isolation capability, and incident response plans specifically built around limiting the blast radius of a cyber incident, precisely because this is a known, actively defended-against risk.
From a comms planning perspective, the cause of a power outage, a storm, equipment failure, or a cyberattack, matters far less than the outage itself. Your radios do not care why the grid went down. What matters is whether your plan already accounts for extended power loss, which is the same planning you should already have in place for a bad ice storm.
What genuinely changes: restoration timelines can be less predictable than a storm-caused outage, since utilities may need to verify systems are secure before fully restoring service. Regional rather than hyper-local scope is more likely. And cell and internet infrastructure, which often depends on the same grid, faces the same vulnerability, reinforcing why radio-based comms matter regardless of the outage’s cause.
Your existing extended power outage plan already covers this scenario adequately. There is no need for a separate, more elaborate plan specifically for cyberattack-caused outages.
Pandemic or Extended Quarantine
A pandemic scenario is genuinely different from most other emergencies here, since infrastructure typically stays intact while the actual constraint is people, movement, and contact, not damaged equipment or downed power lines.
Unlike a hurricane or earthquake, a pandemic generally does not damage repeaters, power grids, or cell infrastructure. Communications networks tend to remain physically intact and functional throughout, which means your plan does not need to account for repeaters going down or extended power outages the way a natural disaster plan does.
What actually changes: contactless coordination becomes valuable, since checking on family or neighbors by radio rather than in person reduces exposure risk. Extended isolation periods mean your plan needs to account for longer stretches of reduced in-person contact, not just a short-term event. Net activity on local repeaters may genuinely increase, since more people are home with more time to check in. Supply chain disruptions affecting radio equipment, batteries, and accessories are a more realistic pandemic-specific concern than infrastructure damage.
During COVID-19, many ham clubs shifted to remote net formats, and some ARES groups supported public health agencies with communications for vaccination sites, testing centers, or other overwhelmed logistics operations. That is a genuinely realistic role for ham radio in a pandemic, supporting served agencies dealing with unusual logistics strain, rather than the network itself being at risk.
A pandemic plan is less about infrastructure resilience and more about maintaining social connection and supporting overwhelmed local systems during an extended period of reduced physical contact.
Chemical Spill or Hazmat Evacuation
A chemical spill or hazmat incident, whether from a train derailment, an industrial accident, or a transportation accident, creates a genuinely different set of communications priorities than a natural disaster, mostly centered on speed and precise official guidance.
Unlike a hurricane with days of warning, a hazmat incident can require evacuation or shelter-in-place decisions within minutes, based on wind direction, plume movement, and the specific chemical involved. Your household needs to already know how you will receive official alerts, since there is rarely time to figure out an alert system in the moment.
NOAA Weather Radio with SAME encoding covers hazmat and chemical incident alerts in many areas, not just severe weather. Local emergency alert systems, including reverse-911 style calls or text alerts from your county emergency management office, are also critical here, since the guidance, evacuate this direction, or shelter in place with windows sealed, is highly specific to the actual chemical and conditions involved.
Unlike most other emergencies, hazmat incidents sometimes call for shelter-in-place rather than evacuation, depending on the specific chemical and wind conditions. This is exactly the kind of decision that should come from official guidance, not personal instinct, since the correct response genuinely depends on details you cannot assess yourself from inside your house.
Your hazmat rally point needs to sit outside the affected zone, since an evacuation zone can be large enough that your normal rally point might actually be inside it. Know your specific area’s evacuation routes in advance, since a chemical plume can make certain roads genuinely dangerous to use depending on wind direction. Speed and official guidance matter more here than in almost any other scenario on this list.
Civil Disturbances or Large-Scale Events
This is one of the scenarios people ask about most and one I have been the most hesitant to write about, because it is as much an operational security problem as a communications problem. I am not going to tell you what to think about a civil disturbance. I am going to tell you what changes about your comms plan if you find yourself near one.
Anything you transmit in the clear on GMRS or ham radio can be heard by anyone with a cheap scanner, including people you would rather not have hearing your location, your numbers, or your plans. This does not mean encrypt, which is not legal for hams, it means think before you key up.
Avoid broadcasting your exact address, your route, or how many people are in your group over an open channel during an actual event. Use pre-agreed code words for status instead, and save specifics for a face-to-face conversation once you are somewhere safe.
Monitoring public safety traffic, local repeaters, and general chatter to understand what is actually happening around you is legal and useful. I go through exactly where the legal line sits between privacy, security, and obscurity in Private, Secure, or Obscure, and that framework applies directly here. Listening broadly and transmitting carefully is the right posture, not going dark entirely.
The best comms plan for this scenario looks exactly like your normal plan, the same rally points, the same schedule, the same code words, just with more discipline about what actually goes out over the air. This is the same lesson from tactical vs. SHTF comms planning, that a locked-down, disciplined plan beats an improvised one every time conditions get genuinely tense.
The Common Thread
Every one of these scenarios comes back to the same underlying truth: your plan is only as good as the habits you already have before the emergency starts. Charged batteries, programmed radios, a family that knows the check-in procedure without being told, and radios pre-loaded with the right local frequencies. The disaster changes the timeline and the tools that matter most, but it never changes that basic requirement.