I hate to be a wet blanket here but it's going to be difficult to impossible to maintain a large-scale voice commo system during a widespread natural disaster.

I hate to be a wet blanket here but it's going to be difficult to impossible to maintain a large-scale voice commo system during a widespread natural disaster. This is stuff that Amateur Radio operators practice on a regular basis and it's difficult even with organized net operations schemes, this is not something people can manage just calling in. There is a very finite amount of bandwidth and during a time when normal commo links are down you need to maximize what bandwidth you have. If you switch to a TTY type interface you are going to be able to maintain comms a lot more efficiently for a given amount of battery life, and a much greater total communications volume. However from what you've said here, the voice is carrying a significant amount of contextual information and this might not be desirable. I recognize the merit of connecting rescuees directly to rescuers. However from what you've said, the "flat" organizational model is becoming a bottleneck and you don't think you'll be able to scale. My suggestion would be to look at the 9-1-1 model. You need to get people to local operators who can triage the most urgent calls according to certain categories (medical emergencies, trapped personnel, etc). You can record the 9-1-1 calls and push very compressed recordings to some kind of central system to maximize trunk bandwidth (assuming this is any kind of limitation vs operator time). During an emergency situation, it is probably not important that these "operators" are actually official emergency personnel, that is what you are doing when you connect rescuees directly to amateur rescuers anyway. I would just directly expose the triage category data to rescue personnel (volunteer or otherwise). Let people see the triaged location+severity of incidents in their area and communicate amongst themselves and they will respond intelligently to the most urgent situations. (again, this communication is much more energy-efficient in text form rather than in live voice) Please let me re-iterate the importance of rehearsing these scenarios. Amateurs regularly drill their net operation skills and since the "Cajun Navy" is now a thing it would be good to rehearse that as well. Nothing dangerous but imagine amateur radio operators calling into a net and requesting rescue at various (water/road-accessible) locations throughout a weekend for a real-world dispatch/recovery operations scenario. It's great that people stepped up but we absolutely need to drill these skills to prevent dumb mistakes. This is going to happen again, courtesy of global warming.