Hurricane!

This resourceful blogger tells about using AOL to communicate after Hurricane Charley knocked out nearly every part of Cape Coral's infrastructure.

To communicate I was sending text messages at first to family, then the phone lines went back up. I happened to have an ubiquitous AOL CD lying around waiting to get tossed in the trash until I realised it was my only option for getting online, if I used dial up and the free trial. Bingo. Within 5 minutes I was online via my laptop and a phone jack and emailing everyone back in the UK. More of a worry was the Dell laptop, the battery on which was straining after an hour which meant I had to take the car out and plug the laptop into the cigarette lighter to charge up. Take into account that there was a curfew at sunset and gas was getting as rare as rocking horse sh*t.