When Disasters Strike, Cell Towers Fall First — So I Built a Mesh Network for Coastal Communities

This is a submission for the DEV Weekend Challenge: Community The Community Over 2 billion people live within 100km of a coastline. Fishermen in Indonesia, families in the Philippines, communities in Haiti and India — people who face cyclones, tsunamis, and floods not as rare events, but as a way of life. Every time disaster strikes, the same thing happens: the cell towers go down first. I grew up in India, where this hit close to home. During Cyclone Ockhi in 2017, dozens of fishermen died at sea off the Tamil Nadu coast. Not because rescue teams didn't exist — because when the storm hit, towers went down and no one knew where they were. Families waited on shores for days. Rescue teams deployed blind. That moment stuck with me. We had phones. We had apps. It wasn't a technology failure — it was an infrastructure failure. The system built to connect people in emergencies was the first thing the emergency destroyed. This is not just India's story. It's every coastal community that has e