Katrina efforts an overwhelming success thanks to your generosity

Together we raised nearly $523,000 for Hurricane Katrina relief to be donated this week to the American Red Cross. In e-mail notices the last couple weeks, we told you our founder and Chairman, Dave Biggers, would personally match dollar for dollar any donations made through our website up to $250,000. You cleared $250,000 on Monday the 12th, but we didn't want to stop you! So in total our customers and other real estate professionals donated $261,453.53, to be matched by Dave.

Combined with our $150,000 donation to the REALTORS® Relief Fund to address housing needs in the wake of the disaster, we collected or donated $672,907.06, an impressive figure that proves that no one understands communities and pitching in like those who work with real estate and homeowners for a living.

One of our Vice Presidents, Adam Calvery, is in Mississippi with his Oklahoma Air Guard unit, and told us the Gulfport, MS area is "like 100 miles of 9/11, or Hiroshima without the fallout." Here are some of his other observations, sent along Sunday, September 11:

It's indescribable, and there are people there sifting through trees, sand, rubble, anything, looking for anything salvageable. I see the water and the MREs [Meals Ready to Eat] they have, and I know that some of that stuff was paid for by donations like those from our customers, and I'm able to see where that money is ending up, and that's really touching. It's absolutely heartbreaking to see these people. It's as though someone took a wire bristle brush about 1/4 to a 1/2 mile wide and just scraped the earth with it. Wherever it touched, it's almost scraped bare to the ground. There was a Ruby Tuesdays I used to eat at when I was stationed in Biloxi for a short time… you couldn't tell it ever existed now. Not the parking lot, not the sign, not the foundation, nothing. It's vanished. There are entire neighborhoods like that.

Our job has been to get the planes on the ground, parked, unloaded and back in the air. The planes range in size from being able to hold six pallets (aircraft pallets are about eight feet by eight feet), to 36 pallets (the C-5 Galaxy is huge, nearly 100 yards long in the cargo bay).

On our side of the runway/parking ramp we unload the planes, and on the other side the Army is loading up every kind of helicopter known to man and flying directly to the neighborhoods and aid stations and delivering the water and food. Since Saturday the 3rd, your Oklahoma Air Guard has unloaded and delivered 1.7 million MREs that have fed 150,000 people. I'm not sure of the total water count, but that's been the bulk of what we've been getting. We unloaded 850,000 lbs of water in one day, and that was about average for the week. We're averaging about 20-30 airplanes a day, and have about 30 people to do the unloading here. My point here is that the money that's being donated is going right to work and feeding people and keeping them "healthy."

If you haven't donated to the relief effort or want to help out more, the Red Cross can use all the cash it can get. Click here to give directly to the Red Cross.

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About a la mode

Founded in 1985, a la mode develops desktop tools, mobile tools, web sites for real estate professionals, mortgage brokers, and appraisers. a la mode's flagship product, WinTOTAL form-filling software for appraisers leads the residential appraisal industry. a la mode's Mercury Network, a vendor management platform for lenders, provides the most experienced local appraisers in an HVCC-compliant, easy-to-use loan ordering and management application. a la mode's mission-critical products are used by hundreds of thousands of appraisers, agents, inspectors, and lending professionals to complete the nation's real estate transactions. The company's state-of-the-art offices are located in Salt Lake City, Oklahoma City, and Washington, DC. To learn more, visit www.alamode.com.