
Ask HN: What can I do for my family living away on a natural disaster? - karakanb
Istanbul has been experiencing multiple strong earthquakes since yesterday and the fault line is the main fault line that was expected to get activated for years already. I live in Europe, in a country that has no danger of earthquakes or anything, but my whole family still lives in Istanbul. Today, there was an earthquake of 6.0 on Richter magnitude scale (RMS), and all the mobile line providers were down because of the traffic, including internet connection as well, and this was a case where the earthquake was much smaller than the big one expected. This whole thing got me thinking, and the more I thought the more depressive I got because of our helplessness against nature.<p>What can I do to communicate with my family in an extreme case like this? What are the precautions we can take in order to account for these cases? I don&#x27;t think the phone line will ever work between them or for cross-border calls, I doubt that WhatsApp or internet, in general, will work under that load as well, let alone the fact that internet infrastructure itself might get damaged, and at this point I am out of options for hearing from them.<p>My questions are:
- What can we do as a family to ensure the highest possibility of having communication in a case like this?
- What can I do as an individual with tech skills to make even some tiny thing better in the case of a natural disaster?
- What&#x2F;how should I educate my family for cases like this?<p>This is a topic where I guess human mind tends to ignore thinking as a self-protection mechanism when you are in the endangered area since it leads to a rabbit hole where all you can think of is the catastrophic scenarios that don&#x27;t lead to any solutions and it seems like there is nothing you as an individual can do to make things better. I am in a similar mindset since I am out of the danger zone but my family is in it, so any kind of input here is appreciated.
======
AnimalMuppet
Satellite phone is the only thing I can think of for communication.

Or perhaps ham radio would work, but you need power to run it, so your family
would need some batteries. (I don't know if that's actually feasible. _Can_
ham radio be run by batteries? If so, for how long?)

