The generator at the county hospital took a pipe through its radiator, putting it out of action. At the fire/rescue station the storm ripped the cover off the generator. It continued to function, but with the circuits soaked the power was very dirty. "We never did find that cover," Faulkner says.

Lesson 8: Lightning strikes twice

Three weeks after Charlie, Hurricane Frances hit the county. The center of the eye passed 10 miles northeast of Wauchula. Again, the county had little warning, and while this was a Category 2 storm, it also moved much more slowly, and the county was still digging out. The emergency management center was down to four of its 25 workstations. The rest had fried their power supplies on the dirty power from the old generator. The school system loaned them 15 laptop computers, but they arrived six hours before Frances, stripped to bare metal.

Faulkner spent four hours building the image on the first laptop. But then he simply used Acronis True Image Workstation to clone that image onto the others. In 22 minutes he had all 15 up and running.

So by the time Hurricane Jeanne arrived a few weeks later, the county had one of the most experienced emergency management teams in the state. Jeanne was a Category 1, barely a hurricane in terms of wind, but it was a slow-moving rainmaker. "It was never made official, but we estimated we had a 500-year flood event. We had water where we never had seen water before."