Traffic signals at about 1,200 Houston area intersections were not yet working Tuesday but should all have at least a flashing red light by the end of next week, said Mike Marcotte, the city’s director of public works and engineering.

“I’ve been amazed with the courtesy our drivers have been showing,” Marcotte said. “Our biggest issue at this point is going out and making repairs on the signals as well as waiting for power to be restored.”

Getting all the city’s traffic lights functioning at pre-Hurricane Ike levels could take until November, Marcotte said.

In some cases, it is not just a matter of getting the power restored, but also repairing equipment pummeled by Ike’s winds and rain, he said.

At least 90 percent of the city’s 2,500 intersections with traffic lights sustained damage from the storm, according to the city.

Commuters fume: Officials plan November return for all traffic signals | Houston & Texas News | Chron.com - Houston Chronicle.

A quarter of a million people in the Houston region were without running water Tuesday, according to the Texas Commission on Environmental Quality, which regulates more than 2,500 public water systems in the 10-county region hammered by Hurricane Ike.

Commission officials did not know about another 600,000 people because they have been unable to communicate with those utilities in the wake of the storm.

The result is hundreds of thousands of people who cannot bathe, use the bathroom, or even cook nearly two weeks after they lost access to running water.

Restoring it may prove complicated. The problem has myriad causes, including power outages and severe infrastructure damage in coastal areas. Some public water systems, which Texas regulators require to continue pumping in spite of power outages, have failed to do so, according to residents they serve and state officials.

250,000 in Houston still lack running water | Houston & Texas News | Chron.com - Houston Chronicle.

And the lights just came on at work…For the first time since the storm…Back to work full time tommorrow.

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It is arguable that, because of his inexperience, Obama is not ready for the presidency. It is arguable that McCain, because of his boiling moralism and bottomless reservoir of certitudes, is not suited to the presidency. Unreadiness can be corrected, although perhaps at great cost, by experience. Can a dismaying temperament be fixed?

George F. Will - McCain Loses His Head - washingtonpost.com.

It almost sounds thatr way to me…

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As a die hard West Wing fan I just loved this from Maureen Dowd…

OBAMA The problem is we can’t appear angry. Bush called us the angry left. Did you see anyone in Denver who was angry?

BARTLET Well … let me think. …We went to war against the wrong country, Osama bin Laden just celebrated his seventh anniversary of not being caught either dead or alive, my family’s less safe than it was eight years ago, we’ve lost trillions of dollars, millions of jobs, thousands of lives and we lost an entire city due to bad weather. So, you know … I’m a little angry.

OBAMA What would you do?

BARTLET GET ANGRIER! Call them liars, because that’s what they are. Sarah Palin didn’t say “thanks but no thanks” to the Bridge to Nowhere. She just said “Thanks.” You were raised by a single mother on food stamps — where does a guy with eight houses who was legacied into Annapolis get off calling you an elitist? And by the way, if you do nothing else, take that word back. Elite is a good word, it means well above average. I’d ask them what their problem is with excellence. While you’re at it, I want the word “patriot” back. McCain can say that the transcendent issue of our time is the spread of Islamic fanaticism or he can choose a running mate who doesn’t know the Bush doctrine from the Monroe Doctrine, but he can’t do both at the same time and call it patriotic. They have to lie — the truth isn’t their friend right now. Get angry. Mock them mercilessly; they’ve earned it. McCain decried agents of intolerance, then chose a running mate who had to ask if she was allowed to ban books from a public library. It’s not bad enough she thinks the planet Earth was created in six days 6,000 years ago complete with a man, a woman and a talking snake, she wants schools to teach the rest of our kids to deny geology, anthropology, archaeology and common sense too? It’s not bad enough she’s forcing her own daughter into a loveless marriage to a teenage hood, she wants the rest of us to guide our daughters in that direction too? It’s not enough that a woman shouldn’t have the right to choose, it should be the law of the land that she has to carry and deliver her rapist’s baby too? I don’t know whether or not Governor Palin has the tenacity of a pit bull, but I know for sure she’s got the qualifications of one. And you’re worried about seeming angry? You could eat their lunch, make them cry and tell their mamas about it and God himself would call it restrained. There are times when you are simply required to be impolite. There are times when condescension is called for!

Op-Ed Columnist - Seeking a President Who Gives Goose Bumps? So’s Obama. - Op-Ed - NYTimes.com.

Maybe we really do need a fictional character as a President…Wait, that’s what we’ve had for seven long years. And it appears that is what the Republicans are trying to sell us in 2008, a fictional McCain that has never existed.

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After the storm, once you realize you’ve lived through another, your awareness of your surroundings is contracted. You begin by wandering around just your own little space surrounding your home…Checking for damage, fixing the immediate needs if possible.

Then you begin to expand your awareness to your neighbors. First you check out those immediately around you, followed by brief inspections of what has happened up and down the road. With Ike, you became aware almost at once that you weren’t going to be venturing too far too quickly…The roads were full of debris. The amazing thing about this storm was the amount of wood on the ground…

From IKE

The next thing you notice is the quite. After the hours and hours of listening to the roar of the storm, even the normal background noise has been muffled. Keep in mind that we are already into early afternoon…And running on little or no real sleep at this point. After looking at the pile of wires and other assorted infrastructure lying across the road out front you know power won’t be returning soon. It’s time to open up the house. Uncover the windows, put the screens up and let some light and air in. This is where the fun really starts…

After making a run around town to see that we were not in any worse shape than anyone else in town, we settled in on the front porch to wait out the cool of the evening. Then it was time to break out the camp stove we had not used in probably ten years and the propane bottles that were stored with it and think about cooking up some supper. Then off to bed to try and get a good nights sleep (the operative word here is try).

Day two found us cooking up all of our bacon and eggs and biscuits before they warmed up and became nothing but more landfill. Then we started digging out…Car first, then gradually the rest of the  house (a job that will probably go on into the future, though the worst is now cut up).

It was on this second evening that fortune decided to smile on the millions of people in the Houston area without power as a “cool” front eased through the area. Dry cool air slowly filtered in from the northwest and made life without power livable. Sitting on the front porch with the family was actually quite pleasant, even with all of the problems around us.

Morning coffee on the porch the next morning was just as pleasant as we planned out what we would do to if we could find the supplies we needed. As the days would go by that would become the primary question…Could we find a store that had what we needed?

More to follow….

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