Fire and flood have been playing havoc with the electronic mail systems that we use to make Computergram available electronically, and to receive much of our news from all parts of the world: floods at Colindale put the British Telecom Packet Switched Service node out of action on Monday, limiting access to the Telecom Gold and Dialcom systems, and a fire at Illinois Bell late Sunday wiped out US and international access to MCI Mail via Tymnet, and to access to the Dow Jones newswire from MCI.