Storm Goretti on Thursday 8th January 2026 brought winds of 99 mph and left more than 200,000 home without power at its peak: some villages were without power for more than four days. The damage included many fallen trees and burst water mains, leaving over 30,000 properties without water.

An Ofcom report says that for outages of an hour, two thirds of the population would be able to make emergency calls using their mobile phones, but for outages of six hours the number would be ‘far smaller’ – but the actual number is redacted from the report. Few mobile masts have multi-hour batteries or generator capacity.

There is concern that in such circumstances, it would be difficult for emergency services to contact their own staff, as neither mobile phones nor radio can function for long on batteries.

Indeed, few people have battery-powered televisions (lap-tops and tablets mainly use wifi rather than GPRS for wireless comms), although many people will have battery-powered radios in their cars

So, the loss of battery-powered telephone exchanges has significantly reduced the resilience of our comms system in emergency situations.