this is my video, using images from across the web…

hope you enjoy it.

elephant at the houston zoo helps sweep up storm debris

scenes in houston - it’s like this everywhere there’s a store open or a gas station

i am as close to being proud of my little city as i’m ever likely to come.  you’re hearing stories like this everywhere you go:

Neighbors at their best amid the worst
Residents team up to clear debris and help injured

By CLAUDIA FELDMAN and MIKE SNYDER Copyright 2008 Houston Chronicle - Sept. 14, 2008, 11:07PM

Ralph Hayes walked up the pitch-black stairways of a north Houston apartment building Sunday, pulling a wheeled ice chest that thumped up the steps behind him. He emerged into a stifling hallway and knocked on the first door to his right.

“Hello?” he shouted. “We’ve got water and sandwiches if you need it.”

Hayes and his wife, Charlotte Hayes, were on a mission of mercy at the Heights House, whose elderly and disabled tenants have been without power, water or telephone service since Hurricane Ike struck the Gulf Coast early Saturday.

Over the weekend, thousands of Houstonians demonstrated similar devotion to their neighbors.

Some gestures were relatively simple — they helped cut up trees, they helped rake up branches, they barbecued enough meat to feed entire blocks. Others, like Hayes, offered potentially lifesaving help.

He knew many of the residents hadn’t been able to evacuate and were short on water, food and other supplies.

“I went out and bought two big bags of sandwiches, and my neighbors made some more,” Hayes said. “But we’ve really just put a dent (in the problem.)”

About 4 a.m. Saturday, just as Hurricane Ike was pummeling the Houston area, Doug Hudspeth thought he heard a voice in his apartment hallway.

When he peeked out his front door, there was neighbor Mark Griffin, talking to a 911 operator about internal injuries. He’d fallen off his balcony, landed on his back and head, and he needed an ambulance to take him to the hospital.

When Griffin learned that wasn’t going to happen for hours, he turned to Hudspeth, whom he barely knew.

“Can you take me?”

Hudspeth, a CenterPoint Energy employee, threw on his clothes, borrowed the keys to his girlfriend’s SUV and braced himself for a frightening ride to Memorial Hermann Sugar Land Hospital.

“We were going 30 miles per hour the whole way, dodging street signs and all kinds of debris,” Hudspeth said.

To make matters worse, he was low on gas. Hudspeth figured he had just enough to make it to the hospital and back home. Instead, he made it to Sugar Land on fumes, stayed with Griffin until he was stabilized, then started calling friends to pick him up.

He’d left home, he said, without money or credit cards, and gas would have been hard to find even if he’d had the means to buy it.

No worries, Hudspeth said. “I’ve been helped before. It was my turn.”

In Garden Oaks, Jerry and Martha Kennedy decided not to sleep in their bedroom Friday night, which turned out to be a lifesaving decision because a tree limb crashed through their roof and crushed their bed.

Almost as amazing, Martha Kennedy said, was the rush of neighbors who came to help, even though they had plenty of storm-related problems of their own.

Some knew how to patch the roof. Others had chain saws, buckets and rakes.

After the Kennedy home was stabilized, the army of neighbors swept up and down 31st Street. They chopped up the fallen tree of one older woman who wasn’t even home, Martha Kennedy said.

“When she comes home, she won’t have a clue,” she said.

Robert Mielke and his wife, dentist Theresa Honeycutt, went to check on her office Saturday morning. On the way home, they helped clear city streets by making full use of their H-1 Hummer.

“We had a winch, and we hooked the cable to the fallen trees and dragged them to the esplanade,” Mielke said. “We probably moved 10 or 12 trees. Then we ran into a tow truck driver — his truck said American Towing — doing the exact same thing.”

Saturday night, Mielke’s Willowbend neighbors moved from house to house cleaning yards and cutting up trees.

“You just want to help,” he said. “You want to see if you can brighten somebody else’s experience.”

In the 3400 block of Southmore, about a half dozen people used two chain saws to remove a split tree — half of which blocked traffic and the other covered a neighbor’s yard.

With saws buzzing in the background, Kenneth Williams said he didn’t know some of the people helping to remove the tree from his yard.

“All these people just came out the blue,” Williams said before rushing off to help a woman remove a branch.

“This gentleman came over from the corner,” he said. “I’d always see him walking his little boy to school. But he came all the way down here to help me do it. These people, I’ve never seen them before. I have no idea who they are.”

When asked how he felt about the generosity, he replied: “I can’t tell you the words.”

In Clute, the heavily wooded Emerald Forest neighborhood is covered with broken trees and smashed limbs. But neighbors are helping each other by sharing their food and chain saws.

Postal carrier William “Ginge” Laza, who has lived on Shanks Street for 25 years, fed up to seven households of neighbors by throwing all the food in his freezer on the grill. He fired up the grill at daybreak, cooking brisket, ribs, chicken, ham, baked beans and green beans.

“He is a wonderful neighbor,” said Emerald Forest resident Carol James. “We told him when he fills his freezer up, we’re going to come over and unplug it so he has to cook all the food in the freezer again.”

Daniel Zepeda, who was among the neighbors eating dinner on Laza’s driveway, spent all day Saturday and six hours Sunday using his chain saw to cut down broken trees in his neighbors’ yards, including homes where residents had not yet returned after evacuating.

“This is an American neighborhood,” Zepeda said. “It’s the American thing to do. We just grew up like that — you help the neighbors when you can.”

Chronicle reporters David Ellison and Peggy O’Hare contributed to this report.

bill white, our mayor, has repeatedly been on the air, calming fears, passing along information, being a morale booster.  he has repeatedly said that you do not need to involve the city gov’t to be a volunteer… just go be one.  if you have food and water, take it to areas that don’t.  if you have electricity and/or water, offer to share with friends/family who don’t.

if you want to help, donations are needed at the houston food bank, the houston red cross, the houston spca.

my power went out friday night about 2am, as ike blew through the area.  sleep was completely out, so i spent the rest of the night watching the tree outside being blown back and forth and listening to things thud against the house scary enough on it’s own, but when the sky is flashing green… ~really~ scary.  just when you’d think, “ok, this must be as bad as it’s going to get”, the winds would pick up.  the eye never actually passed over my area, so we had no break from the storm.  just a constant onslaught.

that’s the shnazzy area a mile or so to the north of me you’ve heard of the “wrong side of the tracks”, i’m the “wrong side of the bayou”

around 8am, the storm was lessening.  checked the bayou, it was up over it’s banks and the street was flooded, but no water in our complex.  we had fences down, a couple of carports damaged, broken window, gutters blown down, tree limbs and leaves ~everywhere~, a few shingles on the ground, and stucco siding ripped off one buiding, but otherwise, our condos seem to have weathered the storm just fine.

when i remembered to take my camera with me, this was the bayou:

read on...

braes bayou culverts - if those are flooded, i’m in trouble.  i do NOT expect that to happen.

houston wind forecasts - 82 mph winds forecast for me

houston chronicle

abc13 houston

houston’s office of emergency management

harris county emergency management

national weather service - houston/galveston