Mike,

I tried to respond to your post, but nothing is coming across on the NG;
tried to send it to your email and don't know if that worked as well, so
I'll try a new post altogether.
What I wrote was:

I just got back in from the store and they were listing the numbers of
people without power by city.  In the areas in and around Orlando there were
about 300K still without power.  Haines city was within the range of
cities/towns they were talking about.  Haines city took a direct hit.  The
map of the eye track in today's paper shows the eye touching the right side
of the dot that marks Haines City.  Sustained winds were at 90 with gust to
105mph in Kissimmee, and Haines City probably had a bit higher.

We are having a lot of problems getting in and outbound calls.  Sometimes it
works great, and other times the lines are jammed; cell or landline.  We
have had people call and it would just ring and ring, and we never heard
anything on this end ( as we would find out later ).  The phone lines never
went down for us; I keep an old corded phone just for power outages when all
of the cordless phones are useless.  Hope you get through.

Today's news (8/16/04) had said Haines City to Frostproof was particularly
hard hit; infrastruture is real torn up, so it could be awhile before
regular lines of communication work.

George