Galveston, Texas - Officer Blake Patton puts his right hand on the butt of his gun and shouts, "Anybody there?"

The house he has been ordered to check looks deserted, but you never know. Patton and his partner, Mustafa, disappear around the back of the house, and a gunshot is soon heard.

A pitbull that was locked up in the backyard is killed in the operation.

"He charged against me, and I had no other option," Patton tells Deutsche Presse-Agentur dpa as he wipes the sweat off his forehead.

His boss is not happy.

"We have to control our nerves. In the coming days we are going to have many extreme situations like this one, or a lot worse," the sergeant predicts.

Patton is one of thousands of public safety and rescue workers who spent the weekend beginning the tough task of rescuing survivors, helping the needy and slowly restoring order and life to a city devastated by Hurricane Ike.

Patton is a police officer in Galveston, Texas, and he faces the same problems as any other resident.

His wife and children evacuated ahead of the storm to stay with relatives north of Houston. Their apartment was ravaged by the seawater pushed across Galveston Island by the storm surge, and he has nothing at home to eat or drink or anywhere to buy provisions.

So far, Patton has been living at the San Luis hotel along with other emergency workers and reporters who rode out the storm on the barrier island, 60 kilometres from Houston.

"I don't know when I will be able to take a few hours off to take care of my business," he says. "I hope it's soon."

Patton and his fellow police in the resort city are hardly alone. Hundreds of firefighters from other states and members of the Texas National Guard and US Coast Guard are among the rescue and relief agencies helping in Galveston.

With Ike's fury just dying down Saturday over the coast, huge convoys of National Guard military vehicles were rolling down highways into Houston, cheered enthusiastically by other drivers.

The road to Galveston, a two-lane highway that leapfrogs from one bridge to another among small islands, remains closed except to emergency transport. There is a constant procession of red and blue flashing lights on the only lane of the road that is free of storm debris.

Rescue efforts on Sunday remained meagre because of the conditions. In some areas of Galveston, especially in the historic town centre, water was still at waist-level, and only Humvee military vehicles could brave the much as rescuers went house to house looking for survivors.

Patton could only watch from a distance with his less robust patrol car.

The task at hand is also unpredictable, hence the nerves that cost the pitbull its life.

When rescue teams enter a house, or whatever is left of it, they do not know whether they will be met by hugs, shots or the stench of death.

Devastation is evident everywhere, but Ike's impact did not surprise the young Patton.

"It's more or less what I expected," he says as he drives through Galveston's flooded 40th Street, pointing at six houses that burnt to their foundations, smoke still wafting from the embers, when they caught fire during the brunt of the storm, when firefighters were unable to venture out.

That is why it is "so frustrating" to have to look for survivors, as city manager Steve LeBlanc says. Residents should have left.

"It would have made our job easier, and deaths would have been avoided," Patton says.

As he speaks, the police radio in his car crackles with an order from headquarters: a burglary has been reported at a bar overlooking the sea. After the hunt for survivors, stopping and deterring looting is the next priority for Galveston police and National Guard troops.

This time, Patton looks a lot more determined. His vehicle moves faster, he chews tobacco more intensely, he spits more often into the bottle by his side.

However, when he gets to the Patio Bar, the sergeant's advice sinks in and he remains serene. He even finds the cool to stop his partner, who wants to take out the huge shotgun that sits between the two officers in the patrol car for all to see.

In the end it is just a false alarm, and the partners soon have another assignment: to help evacuate a sick man close to Broadway, the town's main avenue.

When Patton gets there, the picture seems straight out of a Hollywood film. There is a hulking Black Hawk military helicopter landed in the street. It takes off just minutes later, its blades scraping lamp posts, power lines and roofs as it soars off with the sick man on board.

Patton returns to his car, still tense.

He has done nothing since Thursday but sleep and work, subsisting on cereal bars. At night he patrols to make sure that a post-storm curfew is observed. (dpa)