If Your Vacation Home is on the Texas Coast...

...you're either evacuating or sick with worry. A tip from the Katrina experience -- start to collect phone numbers, e-mail addresses and Web sites now, rather than after the storm hits. Once it does, landlines won't work, cell towers could be down and news reports will concentrate on primary home communities rather than yours. And there's nothing more anxiety-producing than not know what, if anything, has happened to your property.

Good sources: your property manager, your neighbors, your local realtors, Houston and Galveston newspapers. You can probably get a cell phone call through now to people, so find out the number of the hotel, temporary home or family where your contacts will wait out the crisis. Bookmark such sites as the Houston Chronicle and KPRC (Channel 2). During the past few weeks the New Orleans papers and TV stations did a superb job setting up peer-to-peer forums where frantic evacuees could gleen info and exchange notes about their individual neighborhoods.