Another Cost of Hurricane Irene

Apparently I owe Ellen Kobler an apology, if not a check.

"You owe me 25 bucks," Kobler said with a laugh Wednesday.

Kobler, a county spokeswoman, follows me on Twitter and thought it would be a good idea during the hurricane last week to have my tweets sent to her phone as text messages.

What she didn't know, what no one could know, was the large number of tweets and retweets that would come from my account over the next 23 hours. She and other employees working the county emergency operations center monitored the feed all night as we communicated with readers around the county who were telling us what they were seeing and we relayed information from official sources.

Then she received an email from her cell phone carrier warning of overage charges for texting. Given that she doesn't have a teenager burning up a cell tower, she called to find out what was going on.

The helpful customer service person quickly told her that she was about 600 messages over her plan. They came from the hours of the storm.

Most of the messages, Kobler said, came from me.

Fortunately, she said the company agreed to waive the overage charges because of the nature of her job and the storm. Good thing, too, because I'm pretty sure Patch isn't going to let me expense that kind of thing.

So consider yourself fairly warned for our next emergency event— stock up on batteries, food and water for three days for everyone in your family (pets included) and charge everything.

And if you're having my tweets sent to your phone as text messages, look into an unlimited plan. It might be cheaper.

Keep up with what's happening in Baltimore County politics by following Bryan P. Sears on Twitter and Facebook.