Remote Indigenous communities need a taskforce to coordinate emergencies when telecommunications go down, so people aren’t left without food or help as the Groote archipelago was, the local Aboriginal land council has said.

Aboriginal people in the region said they were left “sick, angry, hungry and forgotten” when phones went down for three days. Residents who depend on income management via the Basics card said they could not use it, or withdraw cash, as ATMs and eftpos machines had stopped working.

“Aboriginal communities here have a much lower tolerance or resilience to these types of outages than the non-Aboriginal community members,” said the CEO of Anindilyakwa Land Council, Mark Hewitt.

“We estimate that most households have stores of food which could only carry them through for 12 to 24 hours.

“Given the levels of overcrowding and other pressures inside households, we cannot reasonably expect these circumstances to change in the short term.”

The land council has suggested a “telecoms and power outage taskforce” should be established, led by Northern Territory police and the Department of Chief Minister, and be convened as soon as a power or telecommunications outage looks likely to last for more than 12 hours.

The federal government admitted it had received reports that desperate people were breaking into houses looking for food during the outage.

The National Indigenous Australians Agency (NIAA) told a Senate committee on Friday that it was “still getting the picture” of what happened on Groote Eylandt, but it had “received reports of some unrest at not being able to access food”.

“We were getting verbal reports that there was no access to money, or to be able to buy food,” NIAA’s Sam Jeffries said.

“We did hear reports that there were some break-and-enters into houses. We had reports of people sharing food. But these were just verbal reports we were receiving on a daily basis.”

Telstra confirmed the NT mainland communities of Borroloola and Numbulwar were affected by the same outage, while the Cape York community of Kowanyama was also without telecommunications for three days.

NIAA said it was working closely with the community, Telstra and the Northern Territory government to understand the full impact of the outages and “will raise matters of concern with the organisations responsible for providing services to Indigenous Australians” which it said were Services Australia and the Department of Infrastructure, Transport, Regional Development and Communications.

Services Australia said it “works closely with communities, stores and service providers during outages of any length to provide support.

“When EFTPOS systems are unavailable, we can make payments to stores and businesses via other means, such as BPAY or bank transfer,” Services Australia General Manager Hank Jongen said.

Telstra said storms and flooding meant that technicians could not access the area to conduct repairs, and apologised to communities and residents.

A Telstra spokesman said: “While Telstra’s network is generally very reliable, we can still experience issues occurring due to natural events such as floods and fires, vandalism or accidental damage that can result in a loss of service.”

In Queensland, the Cape York community of Kowanyama was also without phone and internet for three days between 23 and 26 February.

“People here are living week-to-week and were running low on the power and food,” a resident said. “Some people were out of both by the Monday and the only way to purchase anything was through cash, which no one had.

“People were sitting outside the shop distraught as they were hungry and had no power. Local staff at the school went home because they were hungry.”

Other remote Indigenous communities have reported telecommunications failures since the start of the year.

Galiwinku (Elcho Island) in the NT had two outages over Christmas, both lasting three days, and nine central Australian communities went without phone coverage for several days over January, prompting people to drive into Alice Springs to access money and food.