Communication breakdown

Tonight at 8:04pm we had a moderate earthquake, with a magnitude of 5.6. If I'm not mistaken, that's the largest one we've had here in the Bay Area since 1989. I was in the car (probably 40 miles from the epicenter), and it felt like there were people outside rocking my 5000 pound SUV back and forth. Thankfully, it sounds like nobody suffered any serious damage.

The point of this entry isn't to talk about the quake -- it's to talk about the total meltdown of our phone system after the quake. I tried calling my parents (who live on landfill a lot closer to the epicenter) and was unable to reach them for a while... the network was always busy. Finally I got through. An hour later I was checking in, and it took eight attempts to get through. If this is what happens to our phone system after a moderate quake, what are we going to do when the real big one hits?