I would use it in that I would forward the email off to my own server, the same as the rest of my ancillary email addresses. But the alternative pointed to in the article is freaking Hotmail - right into the open arms of the surveillance industry. And that account will likely be forgotten about once the immediate problem is over, making any continuity or later contact moot. [0]

In the abstract, email is actually a much better communication of last resort. A phone number requires you to maintain that phone number for the voice mailbox, or even be immediately reachable for more complex communication that can't be left in a voicemail. Whereas email just sits there until you can check it from many places, and the cost of maintaining an account is effectively ~zero.

And here we're talking about FEMA staff facilitating disaster victims. They could certainly have electronic devices to facilitate people checking their government mailboxes a lot easier than they could facilitate the same with phones. There could be terminals in post offices as well, for when the immediate disaster relief has gone away but someone still can't/won't have their own Internet access.

[0] fun fact: I tag senders using a wildcard character in the address, for example x-somebusiness@mydomain. When I give this style of email out over the phone, I invariably get responses of "you need a real email address", for which I have to explain my scheme and assure them that that is indeed my real email address (at least as far as they are concerned). To me this indicates that there is still a large contingent of people making up "email addresses" on the spot when asked, with no intention of ever receiving email - ie "Email address? Oh uh, John Smith At Google?"

(and yeah I know I could reduce the friction there by making the unique identifier into a nonce or other non-plaintext, and then keeping a mapping. alas, this hasn't really been a priority)