Photo by Gerald L. Campbell.

It’s about as predictable as death, taxes and traffic jams — an emergency hits the District, and within minutes phone networks are so clogged with calls, text messages and data usage that they collapse altogether.

In order to allow city officials to better respond to emergencies and disasters, today members of the D.C. Council were given special cards that allow their calls to take priority during moments of heavy call volume. The cards, which are part of the Department of Homeland Security’s Government Emergency Telecommunications Service (GETS), provide “emergency access and priority processing in the local and long distance segments of the Public Switched Telephone Network (PSTN).

GETS is “intended to be used in an emergency or crisis situation when the PSTN is congested and the probability of completing a call over normal or other alternate telecommunication means has significantly decreased,” according to DHS.

Basically, if there’s an emergency in the District and everybody rushes to make a phone call at the same time, anyone with a GETS card and a PIN number jumps to the front of the line, getting (pun intended!) their call through, even as others struggle to connect. (For normal residents, the D.C. Department of Homeland Security and Emergency Management recommends not clogging the network by streaming video, downloading music or playing online video games. If a call doesn’t go through, wait 10 seconds and try again.)

According to DHS, the GETS card is designed to provide 90 percent call completion rates when call volume is eight times higher than usual.