This paper presents a distributed control strategy with situation-dependent communication for disturbance attenuation in physically interconnected systems by output feedback. To avoid large control errors, the local controllers transmit information to the other local controllers, if the influence of the local disturbance on the coupling input to their corresponding subsystem exceeds a given bound. As a consequence, the communication topology is adjusted to the acting disturbances at all times. It is shown that the local controllers can be designed by using only local model information of the subsystems to guarantee a practically stable overall system, where the complexity of the stability analysis scales linearly with the number of subsystems only. Furthermore, it is proven that the effect of the disturbance can be bounded by an appropriate choice of the information activation condition. The approach is demonstrated by its application to coupled tanks.