Actually, the survival of the Internet connection was almost accidental. The county had an older T1 installation that was powered from its end rather than from the phone company, and it was hooked into the emergency generator. Without that, the county would have been totally cut off.

Today the county has DSL, wireless satellite and a backpack satellite transceiver. And it has a new T1. "The installers wanted to power it from the phone system, but I insisted that it be powered from our end and hooked into the generator." And it has a new propane generator that can go from cold to full power in seconds.

Lesson 4: Batteries don't like generators -- use line conditioners

Faulkner's next challenge came at 11:30 p.m. when the Internet went down. A quick check showed what had happened. Although the old server room was getting power, it had no line conditioners, so the generator was connected to the APC battery packs. But the batteries were not charging, and when they died, power to the Web, e-mail and DNS servers went with them.

Faulkner put a line conditioner on the power supply and hooked it directly to the critical servers, which gave them power, but when he tried to restore using Windows tools, he discovered that the crash had sent the read/write heads wandering across the disk of the DNS/Web server, damaging the partitioning. He needed to restore.