During a hurricane in Florida a few years back, I did not evacuate with my family but rode it out at home. The power died. The humidity was 100%. The loss of power meant the water well stopped working too. We had reserves of water. The more challenging issue was mobile phone battery power. I ended up going to the car to charge the phone battery.

During that hurricane, I learned that mobile phone batteries run out faster than you would like. If conditions are ideal, you can use your car to charge the mobile phone. If the car is not underwater or carried away. Our damage was localized, not area wide or state wide. The local cell towers still worked, sometimes better than other times, to call people and check on their health.

In good conditions, eBook readers have a battery charge that lasts for a month or so, and they offer good device storage for emergency plans as long as your property is not flooded and the roof is not ripped off.

We had wind damage that pulled down power lines and ripped them off the wall of the house, plus thousands of pounds of trees that fell down.

Anyway, about that same time I was asked to prepare an emergency plan for my church. Having done this before, long ago, with paper copies, I knew that paper got out of date much faster because it cost so much to produce and is harder to distribute to all the right people. Bits are easier to distribute than atoms.

So I made electronic emergency plans this time around. I made a PDF format, and epub format, and html pages.

Those members of the congregation under 50 years old seemed to like the electronic version better than having many pages of paper, although they were skeptical of eBooks until I told them about my experience in the hurricane, and charging in the car as a backup. Having a extra battery pack to charge the mobile device is a good idea for emergencies too.

The older members of the congregation had bigger concerns. Many did not have any mobile reader devices. With no smart phones, they could not read the ebook version. With no ebook eReaders (i.e. Kindle, Kobo, Sony, Apple, etc.) they did not see how to access the content. Some looked at me strangely, expecting them to do these difficult things like use electronics.

So we ended up having to make paper copies for some with the electronic for others.

After the hurricane came by to test our emergency plans, we got into iterative revisions to apply all the lessons we learned for that type of emergency.

Then a few months later, we revised again after the county taught community organizations active shooter training.

Those with devices took my updated content various ways, most often emailed the epub or kindle file.

But the paper copies did not get remade each iteration, leaving configuration management issues for the church emergency plan.

We still have that issue today, years later.

Now I live in a different state, yet when showing people how to do genealogy using apps on their smart phone, I run into those that do not use phones at all apparently. They are nice people, and entirely focused on the face-to-face mode of interaction. Some they are on fixed income pensions and do not have a computer at home. For these I have to meet them at the church and use a common computer to help them do their genealogy work.

This quote applied to my efforts to help a non-profit organization prepare for emergencies and still applies today when doing things like helping people do genealogy work.