The telephone service in the county seat, Wauchula, is underground, but the storm pulled many of the cables out of the ground, caught in the roots of 200-year-old oaks. By the time it was finished, 75 percent of the buildings in the county were destroyed or severely damaged. "We are still pulling down homes destroyed by the storm two years later," says Don Faulkner, the sole IT staffer for the county's emergency management center. "Weeks later, I would see concrete block walls fall. The storm had broken the mortar, and suddenly they would just sag and collapse. Today the tallest tree in the county is about 35 feet high."

The following are some of the lessons he learned from the experience.

Lesson 1: Be prepared

Charlie caught Hardee County in the midst of moving the server system into a new emergency management building, actually its old jail, with two-foot-thick walls and windows protected by armored screens "that can take a hit from a 2-by-4 at 60 mph without denting," says Faulkner. But on Aug. 13 the move was not complete. The building had emergency power from a diesel generator, and the D-mark of the county's T1 had been moved to it along with the detached storage server.

"Our other servers were still in the old server room in the building next door, which had no emergency power. As an emergency measure, I ran 400 feet of 12 gauge extension cord from the generator to the old server room and shut down everything non-essential. I brought back backup tapes, disks, basically anything I could carry, and covered everything else in plastic in case the rain got in." As it turned out, that extension cord, lying on the ground between the buildings, survived when everything else failed. A good thing, because the county's DNS, Web and e-mail servers were in that room, and for four days after the storm the only communications the county had with the outside world was e-mail.