General Discussion
In reply to the discussion: Why Cell Phones Went Dead After Hurricane Sandy - horrifying. [View all]LannyDeVaney
(1,033 posts)but living in north Alabama, and basically at ground zero of tornadoes, I can say we after the April '11 tornadoes we had no power for about a week and absolutely no cell phone service for the same time. I would wake up early each morning and drive about 1 hour west to get the maximum ration of ice (delivered to my family members) and I would get a signal there.
I have T-Mobile, but noticed at the time all I saw around the area was AT&T trucks. I asked a friend who worked for a local cell phone company about that and he said AT&T owned almost all the infrastructure in our area and it was leased by other carriers. This wasn't at the tower level, but just upstream of that - the big switches.
The biggest issue for us was above-ground utilities are easy targets for tornadoes. I believe just the opposite is true for flooding.