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"Any idea if their walkie talkies or cell phones are even working?"

I don't know jack about any of this new-tech stuff. I would suppose the cell phones might be screwed up but walkie talkies (at least the real kind) use a radio crystal and set frequencies. The walkie-talkies are also battery powered so the grid and all of the other junk needed to run this new-wave crap has nothing to do with their operation.

Not exactly. Handie-talkies depend on radio repeaters to amplify and boost their signals. They have short range otherwise, especially in major cities with lots of tall buildings. If their communications gear doesn't have some sort of good emergency power, then the repeaters are paws-up, and that'll limit their transmissions to the ranges their HTs or car radios can reach. It'll probably really play hell with the digital radio signals that send data to those portable computers that so many police cars have nowadays.

In 1993 I was living in Lynchburg, VA when we had a massive downburst thunderstorm come tearing through--the closest I ever want to get to a hurricane, 80 mph winds. The entire city lost power, 150,000 people. The police, fire, and EMS repeaters were all knocked off the air and it made things, uh, "interesting". Their ability to talk back to their dispatchers was very limited and depended on whether they were in a good spot or on top of a hill.

The only functioning communications repeater in the area was a VHF amateur radio repeater that some guy had in his backyard, so we wound up sending ham operators to the city emergency operations center and to two of the outlying county sheriff's departments, and used that repeater to pass traffic between the jurisdictions for a few hours, until they got the phones working reliably again. Cellphones, as few as there were in 1993, were of course kerplunt. The city radio repeaters were on the cellphone towers and drew off the same power sources.

}:-)4