When we think about communication during a disaster, it’s common to picture antennas, cables, and cell phone signal. That’s where we started our investigation at Tridecs into how people communicate when floods and fires interrupt everyday networks. Throughout the interviews with organizations, communities, and groups that worked on the front lines of the Rio Grande do Sul floods and the Maranhão fires, another layer gradually came into focus, less visible but just as decisive: the structure that already exists in the territory and that, when the signal drops, takes over sustaining the flow of information.
Solidarity kitchens come up strongly in these accounts. Many were set up during the pandemic and reactivated during the floods, and several interviewees described them as the true starting point of the disaster response. MTST reported that it started with a single kitchen, in Zenha, in Porto Alegre, and had to open new units in outlying regions as demand grew, jumping from around 400 to 4,000 meals a day at the height of the crisis in RS. MAB worked out of that same Zenha kitchen, in partnership with MTST, reaching around 3,200 meals a day, and described food delivery as a way of getting closer to communities and listening to what was happening in them. CUFA set up a network of more than a hundred community kitchens, and Ação da Cidadania chose to strengthen kitchens that already existed in the territory, later linking them together in the Rede Alisol, which today brings together 31 kitchens. One point from the conversation with Ação da Cidadania sums up well what we observed: these pre-existing community networks are, in themselves, already critical infrastructure in disaster situations.
What these kitchens have in common is that they bring together people, food, and movement. Because of this, they also end up functioning as meeting points and mapping points for who needs help. The meal delivered serves as an entry point for uncovering needs that no external registry would ever reach.
Something similar happened with schools, gymnasiums, and churches. InternetSul, an association of internet service providers operating in RS, reported that small providers connected shelters and encampments, installed Wi-Fi, and brought generators to commercial sites, creating community centers in schools, gymnasiums, and churches equipped with satellite connections and cell phone charging points, where people registered needs and messages for family members. At the Civil Defense office in Erechim, one account describes the hospital of an isolated town converted into a crisis committee, being one of the few places that still had some connection, and the donation center at Cristo Protetor, in Encantado, operating as a logistics hub and local intelligence point. When conventional communication infrastructure collapses, it migrates to the buildings the community already recognizes as reference points.
Alongside this physical structure, there is a human structure that proved just as important. In nearly every interview, figures emerge who keep information flowing when technology can’t reach far enough. CUFA reported that, in neighborhoods where the signal went down entirely, communication came to depend on community leaders who traveled to areas with signal to collect rescue requests and pass them on to teams and volunteers. MAB structured coordinators by street and by group of families, responsible for gathering needs and organizing communication with the movement. The United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights, which monitored the response in Porto Alegre, called these figures “natural leaders” — community health agents, staff at public schools and health centers, religious leaders, points of assistance that people already recognize and turn to. In quilombola communities in Maranhão, the accounts show the same logic on a different scale, with neighbors warning each other through WhatsApp groups and joining forces to contain fires before any state agency arrives.
This human layer reveals what we might call a structure of connections between people. It isn’t improvised on the day of the disaster. It comes from bonds built over years, from accumulated trust, from networks that already existed before the water rose or the fire arrived. It’s no coincidence that the fastest responses we found came from organizations already present and recognized locally long before the emergency. Ação da Cidadania highlighted this point, stating that rapid responses only happen when the territory is already prepared before the crisis, which starts with recognizing local knowledge and community networks as essential infrastructure.
Documenting these structures helps broaden the question that guided the start of the research. Communicational resilience depends on the technologies available and, just as much, on the capillarity that sustains information when formal systems stop working. The kitchens, the schools, the health centers, the religious centers, and the neighborhood networks make up a communication infrastructure that is rarely named as such, and that may be one of the most resilient we have.