To all my friends on the east coast or is ever in a disaster zone let me make a few suggestions for communicating because I just heard on CNN that you may not get power or land line phone service for up to 7 days.  Typically your landline phone service will go down, it just happens, so no incoming or outgoing calls.  Sometimes at least after earthquakes here in LA and what I’m hearing from friends voice service has gone down or is jammed with to many users at once.  What’s left?  SMS and data on your cell phone as well as possibly home internet.

My first suggestion is trying to use SMS.  Text messages are much more likely to be sent and received if your cell service is still working, it’s a tiny amount of data and just seems to work.  One issue may be if you have an iPhone over iMessage and your data service is down you may want to turn off iMessage under your message settings.

Next suggestion is viable if you still have data on your phone.  Use iMessage if you have it, try WhatsApp or Viber as well.  But if you have data my best suggestion is to use VOIP.  If you’re on an iPhone or Android then I suggest Bria app.  That’s just the tool, but you can get a free 1 month trial of Phone.com (client) and use that to make your calls.  By the way, they have the best business phone service for small and medium sized businesses.

My last suggestion is the same as the previous one but it’s based on if you have your home, Starbucks or airport internet.  I’ve done this when I was stuck in Madrid once.  Use VOIP like Phone.com or Viber/WhatsApp to make calls or send/receive SMS.

By the way, check out this post about the amazing rescue dog Ben sponsored by AT&T as well as the AT&T Disaster Recovery team.

Good luck to everyone in Sandy’s trail of destruction.