When public safety calls

Coping with a wildfire evacuation — and, potentially, the loss of one’s home — is hard enough.

Having to do so without power and cell phone service is a potential public hazard.

Over the past several nerveracking days, thousands of Californians in dangerous fire zones have been struggling to stay safe and informed without these two vital links, and thousands more whose power was cut off lost cell connections as well. Pacific Gas and Electric Co.’s fire prevention shutoffs led to communication blackouts across the state.

Worst of all, we have no assurances that the cell phone companies’ equipment won’t fail again.

During an emergency, a cell phone is a critical source of safety information. Apart from needing a lifeline to loved ones and first responders, people rely on their phones for evacuation warnings from authorities.

When cell phone towers fail and residents can’t get these alerts, they’re dependent on a knock on the door from a concerned neighbor or an emergency worker. Those in farflung rural areas may be left to figure it out on their own. Either way, the failure of communications infrastructure puts more people in harm’s way.

That’s why it’s so alarming that hundreds of thousands of people statewide were without communications services earlier this week. Before the outages, the phone companies told the Federal Communications Commission that they were prepared for blackouts with generators and batteries.

Despite these promises, many towers still failed. So far, the explanations we’ve gotten from the cell phone companies have been about the difficulty of maintaining service with temporary generators and backup batteries during times of restricted access. No doubt all of that was difficult — but they’ve had ample time to prepare.

The Federal Communications Commission needs to hold these companies accountable, but so does the state. The California Public Utilities Commission requires companies to keep service and provide support for customers who experience a housing or financial crisis due to a disaster.

It needs to investigate what happened here, and to ensure that it doesn’t happen again.