Mass emergencies increasingly cause fire departments to be called upon to help each other provide emergency services. But when several emergency response agencies have to work together, their efforts are often hampered by a lack of network interoperability, leading to degradation of situational awareness. As extreme weather and other forces of nature tend to ignore neat state and national boundaries, decision makers need to take questions of interoperability to heart and include them in their planning. In this paper, we make our recommendations for the best way forward for interoperable critical comms.