As in disasters the availability of information and communication technology services can be severely disrupted, the author explores challenges and opportunities to work around such disruptions. He therefore empirically analyzes how people in disasters use remnants of technology to still communicate their needs. Based on this, he suggests quality attributes whose implementation can support the resilience in technology. To exemplify this he develops iteratively two mobile ad-hoc systems and explores their feasibility and implications for emergency response under close-to-real conditions. Compared to the state of the art both systems are independent from preexisting network infrastructure and run on off-the-shelf smartphones.