Well the trick is, amateur radio is hard. If you want a community to help when there's a storm, earthquake, hurricane, power grid failure, large fire, etc you

Well the trick is, amateur radio is hard. If you want a community to help when there's a storm, earthquake, hurricane, power grid failure, large fire, etc you need them to practice regularly. Ideally with no external funding. Hams are often civic minded, so they will help out in bike races, horse races, and similar events ... especially if they are out of reach of cell towers, which is quite common even in central california. So if you want something to fall back on when the local cell tower and internet provider is down, you need to have something the community finds worth while to participate in when there's not an emergency. So it might seem like a useless hobby when there's internet and no emergency, but that's just the training for them to have the needed skills in an emergency.