Emergency contacts and consulate
This is the page you set up once and then, with any luck, never open again. Most of it is ten quiet minutes of saving numbers before anything is wrong. Start with the one thing worth knowing in advance: dial 911 from a cellphone in San Francisco and you might get the California Highway Patrol, the state’s highway police, instead of the city’s own police. Fremont’s police department says it on their own site: a 911 call from a cellphone outside the immediate area lands with the highway patrol first, and the highway patrol doesn’t receive an address from cell callers. Usually the transfer takes a few seconds, but not always.
So the first number on this page is the direct line to your own city’s dispatch, the desk that answers your city’s emergency calls. Almost nobody who lives here has it saved. Pick your city and the card fills itself in.
Saved in your browser. Nothing is sent anywhere.
Every number on the card dials on tap. Fill in the two fields, screenshot it, and set it as your lock screen. That is the whole point of this page.
CGI is the Consulate General of India, your government’s office here. It handles passports, emergency travel documents, and the paperwork nobody wants to think about. Its emergency line takes WhatsApp, which at 2am beats a phone tree.
Your city’s numbers
The Bay is forty-odd police jurisdictions stacked on top of each other. The non-emergency line is the one you will actually use: a break-in, a stolen catalytic converter, a report you need for insurance.
Text 911 works across San Francisco, Santa Clara, San Mateo and Alameda counties. It is deliberately basic: it takes no photos or video, English only, messages under 160 characters, and it needs your location in the first message. Call if you can, text if you can’t.
311 is for problems that aren’t police matters: a street hazard, no heat in your unit, or an encampment outside your door. SF’s 311 runs 24 hours in 160-plus languages, or 415-701-2311 from outside the city. San Jose runs one too. Most other Bay cities don’t, so there you go to the department directly.
The consulate does less than it used to
Show up at 71 Stevenson St expecting a passport and you’ll be turned away. Passports, visas, OCI cards (the overseas-citizen card), renunciation and police clearance certificates all sit with VFS Global now, the private company that runs India’s application counters. And since 1 August 2025 the miscellaneous and attestation services went there too.
The consulate has opened 2pm to 4pm on Saturdays, Sundays and public holidays since June 2024. It isn’t a general walk-in window. Those two hours cover three things and nothing else: an emergency visa, an Emergency Certificate for travel to India that same day, and mortal remains going out the same day. Call +1-415-483-6629 first, to confirm you qualify and find out what to bring. Otherwise you drive to SoMa on a Sunday to be told no.
There’s also an Open House on working days, 9:30 to 11:30am, for enquiries and grievances, by appointment.
If you lose your passport
Step one gates everything else, so do it right.
The VFS checklist is full of small rules that will bounce your file. The envelope has to have “RE-ISSUANCE IN LIEU OF LOST PASSPORT” written on the outside. One envelope holds exactly one application. Prepaid FedEx labels aren’t accepted. You need both an Indian and a US address on the form, and registering online before mailing is mandatory.
On timing, the consulate’s own position is that you shouldn’t even ask until 20 working days have gone by. That is four weeks of business days as the floor, not the answer. A lost-passport re-issue also triggers police verification back in India, and that is the step that wrecks every estimate. Plan for six to eight weeks. Give VFS your correct Indian address, with the right police station and district, because a sloppy address is the most common reason verification stalls for months.
Your visa stamp was inside that passport, and it’s gone with it. That is a conversation with an immigration lawyer, not a webpage. Meanwhile: scan your passport, visa and I-94 (your electronic arrival record) into cloud storage, print one set, and leave it somewhere that isn’t your bag. It turns a crisis into paperwork, which is the best outcome available.
Urgent care or the ER?
The ER is the hospital emergency room. Urgent care is a walk-in clinic for things that aren’t life-threatening. Tap what’s happening below. If you’re stable and it can wait two hours, urgent care is the answer.
Uninsured patients get charged at list price, roughly two to two and a half times what an insurer pays for identical care. Four protections exist, and none of them are widely known.
Find your nearest urgent care in Maps this week, while nothing is wrong. And get insured: the 60-day enrolment clock is in the healthcare file.
Break-ins, landlords, crashes
Locked out, no heat, a burst pipe: call your landlord or the building’s emergency line first, which is why you save that number the day you sign the lease. SF tenants can escalate housing-condition complaints to 311.
A car break-in: photograph everything before you touch anything, then file the report. San Francisco police take vehicle burglary, theft, vandalism and tampering online. Stolen vehicles, or anything with a known suspect, need a call or a station visit. Then follow the rule every long-timer repeats: leave nothing visible in a parked car. That means no bag, no jacket and no charging cable on the seat.
A crash: get to safety, call 911 if anyone is hurt, and take photos and insurance details. Don’t discuss fault at the scene with anyone.
The earthquake setup
You’ll feel one. Almost all of them are nothing. The setup takes four minutes, and you do it once.
MyShake sends a ShakeAlert warning for magnitude 4.5 and up, a few seconds ahead of the shaking. Free, on both platforms, built at UC Berkeley. Android phones already have ShakeAlert built into the operating system, under Settings, then Safety and emergency, then Earthquake alerts. Turn it on either way. When it fires: drop, cover, hold on. You don’t run outside.
Then sign up for your county’s alerts. In San Francisco, text your ZIP code to 888-777 or use alertsf.org. Alameda runs AC Alert, San Mateo has SMC Alert, Santa Clara has AlertSCC. Register more than one ZIP code: where you sleep and where you work.
What to do now
Tick these off as you go. Saved in your browser.
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Good to know
If you take one thing from this page
All of this assumes you’ll read a webpage during an emergency. You won’t. You’ll open your phone, your hands will shake, and you’ll dial the one number you can remember.
So take the lock-screen card. It is seven numbers on one image, and it takes ten minutes on a quiet Sunday. Everything else here, the fair-pricing thresholds, the VFS envelope rules, who qualifies for an Emergency Certificate, is for the afternoon you spend cleaning up afterwards. It will still be here.