I don’t see how you could get enough reliability to do either from any distance.

I’ve been fooling around with Meshtastic for a couple years and haven’t come up with a real world use for it yet, other than scenarios like you mentioned.

What would be really cool is if cell phone makers could incorporate a mesh into their phones as a local public channel when the tower goes out. It would probably just be used by drug dealers or something, but it’s the only cool and functional idea I can come up with.