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Even as record-breaking snowfall continued to pile up across the region, Takoma Park and Silver Spring residents stepped up to the challenge, doing their part to help their neighbors in need. After spending an afternoon riding in a city snowplow during the first storm Feb. 7, Takoma Park Mayor Bruce Williams decided to take advantage of his four-wheel drive truck, organizing donations from neighbors to keep the busy plow crews fed during the height of the snowfall.

Sending the word out through online community listservs, Williams picked up the donations from his snowed-in neighbors and made three trips to the public works facility, delivering everything from hot casseroles and Valentine's Day cookies to granola bars and chips for the hungry drivers.

"To keep doing it for 12-hour shifts day after day, not being able to go home to your family," Williams said in a telephone interview Friday. "It was seeing all of that going on and having a better understanding of what's involved; I said, ‘Gee, how about getting together some food?' There were people who were immediately willing to pitch in."

According to Williams, the city is already planning a special event to allow residents an opportunity to thank the public works employees who battled the storms. Even after the emergency shifts had ended and streets began to open up, Williams was still out and about, digging out his neighbors' cars and cleaning up driveways after the odd snowplow visit.

Meanwhile, residents across the city were also taking advantage of online forums. Members of Takoma Time, a city time bank in which members exchange services with their neighbors, posted offers to drive snowed-in residents to appointments and help shoveling, according to founding member Simone de Lima.

"A lot of members have been offering to help shovel people out and things like that," she said last week from her home in the Washington, D.C., neighborhood of Takoma Park. "There is one man, Charles [Guedenet], who has offered to help shovel, and I'm sure that will be a very popular post."

Takoma Time members earn hours by helping other members in any way they can; pet-sitting, driving one another to the airport or, in this case, dealing with the wintry accumulation. De Lima, who is from Brazil, even has an offer to teach Portuguese.

In Silver Spring, the neighborly attitude continued even after the roads had been cleared Sunday, as seven residents and members of a Montgomery County Action Committee for Transit met on Fenton Street to begin digging out bus stops and sidewalks for pedestrians preparing to get back to work.

After reading a Washington, D.C., blog, in which the author organized residents in his neighborhood to clear off public transportation stops and public sidewalks, the Silver Spring group sent out an e-mail to its own community listserv for the same idea, according to Hans Riemer.

"I came down for a couple of errands yesterday, and I saw some people walking in what I thought were some pretty dangerous conditions," he said, attacking another ice patch Sunday. "I thought it was about time for some of us to take matters into our own hands; ... that's how community building really works."

"It's better than sitting around eating cookies," Tina Slater added, explaining that she had looked up how many calories an average person burns shoveling snow for an hour to offset the baked goods her daughter had made at home.

"So we just burned 750 calories? That's what. A couple pieces of cake? Maybe a cookie or two?"