North America's emergency plans were built for seniors who don't exist anymore

North America's emergency plans were built for seniors who don't exist anymore

When a severe weather alert goes out, most people now expect it to land on a phone in their pocket. Public-safety planners on both sides of the border have long assumed older adults were the exception, still tethered to a landline. New federal data from the U.S. and Canada show that assumption is roughly a decade out of date.

Life Assure analyzed five federal datasets from the CDC, NTIA, U.S. Census Bureau, and Statistics Canada to map how older adults across North America actually communicate today. According to the CDC's 2024 National Health Interview Survey, 74.6% of U.S. adults aged 65 and older now rely primarily on a cell phone. Only 12.3% still lean mostly or entirely on a landline. In Canada, Statistics Canada reports that 82.6% of seniors used the internet in 2022, and the share of Canadian households with no landline has climbed to 52.2%. The U.S. and Canada are moving at different speeds in the same direction.

Public sentiment hasn't caught up in either country. AARP's 2025 Tech Trends report found that two-thirds of U.S. adults 50-plus say technology makes daily life easier, yet most also feel products and emergency tools aren't designed with them in mind. Statistics Canada's own analysis describes Canadian seniors as "more connected than ever."

Key Findings

• 74.6% of U.S. adults 65 and older rely primarily on a cell phone, when wireless-only and wireless-mostly users are combined.
• Just 12.3% of U.S. seniors still rely mostly or exclusively on a landline.
• 82.6% of U.S. adults 65 and older live in households with both broadband and a computer.
• 89.6% of British Columbia seniors used the internet in 2022, the highest rate of any province.
• 52.2% of all Canadian households are now cell-only, up sharply from prior decades but roughly 26 percentage points behind the U.S. rate of 78%.
• The Senior Emergency Connectivity Index ranks Utah (93.3) first across all 61 jurisdictions; New Brunswick (6.6) ranks last, behind even the lowest-scoring U.S. state.
• The top 10 ranked jurisdictions are all U.S. states. The highest-ranked Canadian province, British Columbia, lands at #11.

Landline-Based Outreach Has Aged Out

Five years ago, a typical emergency-management briefing in either country might have flagged landline-based protocols as a baseline tactic for reaching older residents. Reverse 911 systems and automated robocalls assume a fixed line tied to a physical address. That assumption was anchored in real data once. It is no longer anchored.

In the U.S., the CDC's July-December 2024 release shows just 4.3% of seniors live in landline-only households. Another 8% are landline-mostly. The remaining 87.7% have moved on. Canada has followed the same arc more slowly. Saskatchewan now leads the country with 59.5% of households cell-only; Newfoundland and Labrador sits at the other end at 31.3%. Canada trails the U.S. by roughly a decade of adoption, but the curve looks the same.

A phone-tree protocol built around landlines now misses many of the people it was designed to protect.

Older Adults Across North America Are Already Online

In the U.S., 82.6% of adults 65 and older live in a household with both broadband and a computer. The Canadian equivalent measure, internet use from any location, comes in at 82.6% for seniors in 2022. The two surveys define connectivity slightly differently, so the matching figures are coincidental, but the directional story is consistent: Roughly 4 in 5 North American seniors are online. British Columbia (89.6%), Ontario (85.4%), and Alberta (84.3%) all sit above the Canadian average.

AARP adds texture for the U.S.: Older adults own an average of seven tech devices, led by smartphones (91%), smart TVs (78%), and tablets (62%). Canadian smartphone adoption among adults 50-plus reached 72% in recent Pew Research tracking. Each of those devices is a potential alert channel that the average county or provincial emergency-management plan does not currently use. Being online does not automatically enroll a person in Wireless Emergency Alerts or Alert Ready notifications, but the capacity is there. What's missing is awareness and enrollment, not access.

Why Some Older Adults Choose to Stay Offline

About 7.2% of U.S. adults 65 and older live in households without both broadband and a computer, according to an analysis of 2025 U.S. Census American Community Survey. Surveys of nonadopters consistently find that for the majority of offline seniors, the barrier is not access but preference, driven by privacy concerns, scam exposure, and difficulty finding senior-tailored tech support.

AARP research identifies data privacy as the single largest barrier to tech adoption among older adults, cited by roughly one-third of respondents. Concerns about online scams add to the hesitation. The FBI's 2024 IC3 Elder Fraud Report found adults 60 and older lost $4.885 billion to internet-based fraud in 2024, the highest losses of any age group. Reaching this slice of the population means meeting them where they are: local TV and radio, NOAA weather radios in the U.S., Environment and Climate Change Canada bulletins across the border, and neighbor or family check-ins.

Regional Gaps Cluster in Familiar Places

The Senior Emergency Connectivity Index, which combines digital connectivity for seniors with cell-only household adoption, places Utah at 93.3 out of 100. West Virginia sits at 31.9. The top 10 jurisdictions are all U.S. states with younger overall populations and more recent telecom investment. The bottom of the U.S. ranking, West Virginia, Mississippi, and Louisiana, sits across Appalachia and the Deep South.

Canada's pattern looks familiar. British Columbia leads at 77.6, edging into the U.S. top tier. The three lowest-ranked jurisdictions across the entire index are Atlantic Canadian provinces: New Brunswick (6.6), Nova Scotia (21.8), and Newfoundland and Labrador (24.1). The drivers are also familiar: older populations, more rural geography, and longer-tenured residents who installed landlines decades ago and never had a reason to switch.

For provincial emergency managers in Fredericton or Halifax, the implication is practical. A cell-first alert strategy that works in Vancouver or Calgary will leave large pockets unreached in the Maritimes. Keeping landline-based outreach as a primary channel, not a fallback, remains the right call in those regions.

How the Two National Alert Systems Compare

Modern emergency communication on both sides of the border increasingly runs on cellular. In the U.S., Wireless Emergency Alerts have been the foundation since 2012, pushing loud, automatic notifications to nearby cell phones during severe weather, AMBER alerts, and other emergencies. Canada launched its equivalent, Alert Ready, in 2015, with wireless distribution mandated for all LTE-capable devices as of April 2018.

Both systems share the same gap. They reach the cell phone in a person's pocket. They do not reach the wall phone in the kitchen, the resident who has opted out of the internet, or the senior living alone who has set their device to silent. Layering matters: WEA and Alert Ready as the foundation, landline outreach retained as a primary channel for the regions and households that still depend on it, and human check-ins for older adults who live alone. About 26.5% of U.S. adults 65 and older, roughly 14.8 million people, live by themselves. Canadian data show a comparable share, particularly among women.

For families, the questions are practical. Does every older relative have a working cell phone with an active data plan? Is anyone in the household still primarily on a landline? If a relative lives alone, who actually calls to confirm they got the alert? Medical alert devices, the wearable pendants and watches that connect a wearer directly to a monitoring center at the press of a button, increasingly run on cellular and Wi-Fi rather than landlines. The household has to be set up to support them.

Summary

The image of an older adult reaching for a kitchen landline is comforting but increasingly inaccurate across North America. Most seniors have already crossed into a cell-and-internet world, the U.S. ahead of Canada but both moving in the same direction. Catching up is less a technology problem than a planning one, with responsibility shared between federal agencies in Washington and Ottawa, state and provincial governments, and individual households.

Methodology

To understand how adults 65 and older communicate across North America today, Life Assure analyzed five federal datasets covering phone status, internet use, and living arrangements in both countries. In the U.S., the CDC's National Health Interview Survey (NHIS) Early Release, July-December 2024, provided national phone-status estimates; the NTIA Internet Use Survey, November 2023 CPS supplement, supplied internet and device-use rates by age group; the U.S. Census Bureau's American Community Survey 2023 5-Year Estimates (Tables S2801, S2802, and B09020) provided household connectivity and living-arrangement data. In Canada, Statistics Canada's Canadian Internet Use Survey 2022 (Table 22-10-0135) provided senior internet-use rates by province, and the Survey of Household Spending 2021 (Table 11-10-0223-01) provided cell-only household rates by province.

The Senior Emergency Connectivity Index ranks all 50 U.S. states, Washington D.C., and Canada's 10 provinces on a single 0–100 scale. The composite score combines two normalized metrics: digital connectivity for seniors (60% weight) and cell-only household adoption (40% weight). U.S. and Canadian metrics measure slightly different concepts in different years, so scores should be interpreted as relative rankings within this study's framework rather than precise cross-border comparisons. Six Canadian provincial cell-only values were estimated from cell-phone-to-landline spending ratios in the 2021 SHS. Puerto Rico and the three Canadian territories are excluded due to data availability.

This story was produced by Life Assure and reviewed and distributed by Stacker.