I have mentioned this in a couple of previous posts, but about 3 am. on Sept. 13th, a large oak tree fell on the north Houston house of one of my sisters. She and her dogs are OK, but it scared them all to death.
There is structural damage so she has hired a contractor and rented another house on a month-to-month basis while repairs are made. Our SIL is a realtor and helped her find the rental.
The big oak tree took down a large pine tree and that is believed to have reduced damage to the house. The trees couldn't be removed from the house until Monday because of all the rain, so my sister worked all weekend to confine the water damage to just those two bedrooms. The front windows did not break (amazing!), so she "only" had to deal with water coming in the holes in the roof.
About half the roof is now covered with blue plastic. The two front bedrooms have been striped down to the studs to prevent mold damage. Those rooms are open to the attic and the roof has holes (covered by the plastic).
If you have a Snapfish account or are willing to create one (no spam), there are lots of pictures at
http://www2.snapfish.com/share/p=514201221914026166/l=430882657/g=35632397/otsc=SYE/otsi=SALB
The first picture is captioned "Tacky Skylight". There are outside pictures before, during, and after work to take down the trees. In addition, there are pictures of the inside damage.
My sister counts herself lucky considering that people closer to the coast completely lost their houses!!! People need to remember that this was only a cat 2 storm. Imagine the damage if Ike was a cat 5. Rebuilding in the more heavily damaged areas is unwise.
The high storm surge levels with Hurricane Ike are causing a redefinition of the current category#-wind-surge table: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Saffir-Simpson_Hurricane_Scale
Note on using Snapfish: Once you have displayed a large version of one of the pictures, there is a horizonal scroll bar below the picture that allows you to easily view all of the thumbprints.