Since this outage is still going on just a town away from their HQ... porting still works to get you going again on the same towers. You can get the device unlock pin from Verizon postpaid sent through a push message to the device so it doesn't rely on SMS.

Ironically I was planning to port my parents from Verizon to US Mobile to save them some money since they aren't financing any devices (there's a sale from them that ends today) and I've just done that on the first line and I now have service on that line with Verizon, where the remaining Verizon postpaid is still dead.