During the early days of the 20th Century, communication was slow and cumbersome. The crisis of the 1908 fire in San Francisco could only be understood on the East Coast as telegraph keys pounded out the details. Morse code ruled the day!
Today's modern communication and emergency networks are far superior to what has existed in the past, when they work. The inherent problem with many of these new advances is that they are very dependent upon a rather fragile infrastructure. In 2003 the massive Eastern and Midwestern States as well as parts of Canada suffered a total electrical blackout affecting as many as 45 million people. More than 508 generating units at 265 power plants shut down during the outage. The reliability of the electrical grid was called into question.
In 1999 Southern Brazil was darkened by a grid failure that started with a lightning strike. Over 95 million people went without electricity and more than 60,000 people were stuck in Rio