BREEZY POINT, N.Y. -- The construction noises are almost constant at daytime in this coastal enclave six months after Hurricane Sandy, but for many residents whose homes were badly damaged, recovery is moving at a slow pace – or not at all.

Many of those displaced by the so-called superstorm say they are stuck in limbo, trying to raise money to pay for repairs or replace their homes while coming to grips with new, federal flood-zone maps that many fear will make it too costly for them to return.

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“We're no better off than we were six months ago," said Kieran Burke, a fire marshal who lost his home to a massive fire that erupted at the height of the storm. " ... I'd like to have an idea when I can tell my wife our children can go home.”

Burke’s dilemma is not unique to hard-hit Breezy Point, where more than 75 percent of the homes were either consumed by fire or suffered flood damage.

Some 39,000 people in New Jersey remain displaced by the storm, Gov. Chris Christie said Thursday. The number of New Yorkers still out of their homes is unclear, though federal officials said 350 households in the affected region are still getting money for hotel or motel stays.

“We’ve just got the tip of the iceberg in terms of the amount of work that needs to be done,” said Michael Byrne, the Federal Emergency Management Agency's senior official in New York state for the Sandy response and recovery.

Though people now have some resources to rebuild, he said, they “still have some tough questions to answer ... especially people that are in high-risk areas: 'How do I rebuild?' or 'Do I leave, do I seek a buyout?’ So, there’s still a lot of tough issues to be worked out.” 

Sandy blasted ashore on Oct. 29 near Brigantine, N.J., leaving more than at least 147 people dead in its wake in the Caribbean and the U.S., according to the National Hurricane Center. Nearly 74,000 homes and apartments in New York and New Jersey, where it made landfall on Oct. 29, sustained damage, according to FEMA.

Some 450 homes in New York were destroyed by the storm, while approximately 46,000 in New Jersey were destroyed or sustained major damage, according to FEMA.

FEMA has given more than $1.3 billion to more than 180,000 Sandy victims in Maryland, Rhode Island, Connecticut, New Jersey and New York. The National Flood Insurance Program has paid more than $7.1 billion in claims.

                                     View an interactive panorama: Sandy-battered town, then and now

Some survivors whose homes sustained minor damage quickly returned home, as did some others who were able to shelter in place while they repaired and rebuilt.

But in devastated communities like the Irish-American enclave of Breezy Point, many residents had to wait for the gas, power and water to be restored and insurance funds to come through -- if they did -- while still paying mortgages plus rent.

“Some families and some lives have come back together quickly and well and some people are up and running,” New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo said last week. “Some people are still very much in the midst of the recovery. You still have people in hotel rooms. You still have people doubled up. You still have people fighting with insurance companies, and for them it’s been terrible and horrendous.”

That seems a fitting description of Karly and Anthony Carrozza's situation in their neighborhood in Brick Township, N.J., which is dotted with “for sale” signs. Reconstruction work immediately ground to a halt in January, when FEMA released initial drafts of its new flood maps, which placed the community into the highest risk zone, they said.

If the maps are finalized as drawn, residents’ homes would have to be raised 11 feet and placed on pilings. Some state residents who don’t meet the requirements could face flood insurance premiums of up to $31,000 a year, according to Gov. Christie.

“The cost to put this on pilings would not be worth the value of the house. It wouldn't make any sense,” Anthony Carrozza, 34, an equities trader, said this month of their small home on a lagoon.

But the couple would have to pay off their $300,000 mortgage if they wanted to demolish the house and start anew.

“We're all kind of in the same boat in a sense that until they have the final maps come out we can't make any decisions,” Karly Carrozza, 36, an account executive, said.

She has joined a group of New Jersey citizens facing the same difficult choices -- called Stop FEMA Now -- to advocate for changes to the flood maps. They also have recently ventured to New York City to band forces with homeowners there.

She feels if they don't act, their coastal community will never be the same.

“You could be in the middle class and enjoy a house on the water and I just feel like that's all going to change because a lot of the people around us who are going to walk away -- their homes are worth nothing,” she said. People who could afford to put the houses up to code "are going to come in and just scoop up the property," she added.

In the meantime, the couple is staying nearby with Karly's parents to avoid paying rent in addition to their mortgage. Tarp and plastic cover part of the inside of their home, which took in a few feet of water.

“There's people whose homes look much worse than ours, but it's almost like we're in no different of a predicament because our hands are tied,” Karly said. “We can't make any decisions, we can't move back. ...We're in no different a predicament today than we were the day after the storm.”

Shifting sands have covered nearly all remnants of Kieran Burke’s bungalow in Breezy Point.

The family home, which sat for decades on what were known as the “sand lanes” in this idyllic seaside community, burned to the ground with nearly 130 other residences in the fire – the largest in the city's modern history – that was triggered by the storm.

The Army Corps of Engineers removed the charred remnants earlier this year, leaving just sand across a broad swath of an area known as The Wedge.

Located in one of the older parts of the private cooperative, Burke's home, like those of his neighbors, wasn't fronted on a city-mapped street. That means he will need approval from the NYC Board of Standards and Appeals on rebuilding plans.

The agency has vowed to expedite the process, and the Breezy Point Cooperative is working with architects to design homes that will meet expected new city building requirements, as well as those from the flood maps – a preliminary version of which should be released in the coming weeks. So Burke is still waiting to break ground.

“It’s devastating. It’s angering,” he said of the shifting planning landscape. “I’m paying a mortgage on an empty plot of land, we’re paying rent in a place that we're displaced in, that I have no conception of when I’m going to have the ability to move out of.”

Burke, a New York City fire marshal, and his wife, Jennifer, both 40, have a two-year-old son, Kieran Junior, and they just welcomed another boy, Matthew, a little more than two weeks ago. They've been living in an office converted into an apartment in Yonkers, north of Manhattan and about an hour's drive from Breezy Point.

“It doesn’t really seem to look any different than when I was here before, and I would have thought at least some of the other parts of it would have progressed a bit,” Jennifer Burke, a pharmaceutical research manager, said this month as she stood on the spot where her kitchen used to stand. “We’re just still waiting and still hoping. … The hardest part is just not knowing.”

A few blocks away, in a corner of the community facing Jamaica Bay, the Fischers have moved back into their two-story home, even though it sits amid empty lots where neighbors once lived and is still being worked on.

Christina and Barry Fischer, parents of five children, broke their lease early from a rental in northern Queens in late March because their FEMA rental aid ran out and they had expenses piling up (the FEMA money later came through).

Some painting, tiling, sanding and cabinet work is among what remains to be done on the first floor, but now their children – ranging in age from 5 to 15 – can ride their bikes on Breezy Point’s quiet streets, go to church or the store by themselves, play on the beach and catch up with friends who have returned.

When asked how it was to be home, one of the children, William, 10, exclaimed “Great!” as he snacked on Mallomars. “I can actually go outside.”

Nonetheless, the road has been hard, with Christina Fischer, 35, taking leave from her job as an adjunct professor at St. John's University in Queens to focus on rebuilding, including battling with the insurance over money and fighting for months to get help from the city's “Rapid Repairs” program.

That program, a first-ever federal-local initiative, offered to install free boilers, hot water heaters and do the necessary electrical work to restore power, but many who applied encountered long delays and sloppy workmanship when they did get service.

The family also has two special needs children whose classes and therapy sessions had to be re-arranged in the aftermath as people were displaced and classrooms flooded.

But the Fischers weren’t complaining in early April when a reporter met with them to take stock of how far they'd come. Tim, 7, pushed his bike through the sand, Georgia, 5, watched a movie on a computer tablet and the family dog, Scout, sat atop a pile of laundry as Barry Fischer, a 45-year-old electrician, tested out the new washer and dryer.

“The three greatest words in the English language: home sweet home,” Barry said. “There ... is nothing better.”

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BREEZY POINT, N.Y. — Irish Prime Minister Enda Kenny on Sunday encouraged people in this coastal enclave hard hit by Hurricane Sandy and with strong ties to Ireland to "keep your courage up, keep your spirit up" as they rebuild and said his compatriots were behind them as they soldiered on.

Breezy Point's Catholic Club Pipes & Drums welcomed Kenny, as did hundreds of community members, many who wore kelly green or shamrocks for St. Patrick's Day. Kenny joined Mass at St. Thomas More Catholic Church, where the altar was decorated with Irish and American flags flanking an iconic statue of the Virgin Mary saved from the storm rubble, and orange, white and green ribbons were pinned to the pews.

"I'd like to think that in the times ahead ... this community will be restored to a stronger position than it's ever been. It may not be the same physically, but the heart of that community, the strength of that community, will be retained for the future," he said after Mass in a local gym-community center that was restored by Irish athletes and paid for with Irish government funds.

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"Keep your courage up, keep your spirit up. You will never be beaten if you do that," he added, at times mentioning the challenges Ireland had overcome, such as the mid-1800s famine, and the Irish concept of meitheal, or the community coming together to rebuild, to encourage the residents to push on.

 

Hurricane Sandy rampaged through Breezy Point on Oct. 29, unleashing floodwaters that devastated some 75 percent of the community's 2,800 homes and helping to trigger a fire that claimed 126 houses in one of the oldest parts of the neighborhood.

Some 20,000 residential buildings in New York City were damaged by the storm or their utilities were disrupted by it.

Nearly five months later, people are struggling to return to Breezy Point, which was founded by Irish immigrants more than a century ago and is nicknamed the "Irish Riviera." The community is one of the most Irish neighborhoods in America, with more than half of the residents claiming Gaelic heritage, according to the U.S. Census Bureau.

Ireland gave $320,000 to community projects in the areas most affected by Hurricane Sandy, including $50,000 to rebuild the gym-community center in Breezy Point.

Volunteer groups, some from Ireland and others Irish-American, have pitched in to help, such as those who rebuilt the gym and the Catholic Club across the street. The entrance to the gym reads, in Gaelic, "A thousand welcomes."

"In Ireland, everybody knows about Breezy. ... Breezy has just become iconic," said the Consul General of Ireland, Noel Kilkenny. "It just captured the imagination ... Breezy became a piece of Ireland in New York."

Homes here are in various stages of recovery: some have been reoccupied, while others are being rebuilt. Yet many others have been completely demolished, leaving behind only sand or some bits of foundation. Many of these homeowners have to await official approval of their rebuilding plans before they can begin construction.

The toll of the rebuilding process — especially the length and the cost -- is adding up for folks, some who are awaiting insurance payments or other financing options to get back home.

So Kenny's visit -- part of a week-long trip to the United States -- was a welcome boost for the residents, many who can trace their roots to Ireland. 

"I think it really helped the morale of the entire community," said Marty Ingram, fire chief of the Point Breeze Volunteer Fire Department. "The timing was perfect because, you know, I think it's protracted and we're feeling the long-term effect of ... the impact."

As tears rolled down her face, Denise Sturm, 66, said: "I think it's very touching and it's good to know that people in Ireland have come to help us and we need help, we need that."

She should be able to return home within two months, but others won't: "The sad thing is so many of the people (whose) houses were totally destroyed, the disappointment has come now where whatever the red tape is they're not able to get permits to rebuild."

Sturm's friend, Evelyn Finn, said the visit "strengthens us." Her home, which once belonged to her grandmother, was flooded and may need to be raised several feet according to preliminary federal flood guidelines released in late January. She gets no federal aid since it was a second residence.

"It makes it's real," Finn, 65, who attended Mass with her daughter and four grandchildren, said of Kenny's visit. "It makes it like it's doable. My god, if the prime minister of Ireland took enough time to come and see us ... it must be coming back."

NEW YORK — As millions of Americans braced for a winter storm bearing down on the Northeast on Friday, people still recovering from Hurricane Sandy stood in line at gas stations to buy fuel and stocked up on wood for the fireplace. It was, one man lamented, "like a nightmare of Sandy all over."

Sandy left about 20,000 residential buildings in the city with some damage or disruption to their utilities. Thousands are struggling to rebuild, with many sheltering in their battered homes.

The incoming storm is just the latest round in an unforgiving winter. A snowstorm hit New York City one week after Sandy struck and in late January, temperatures plummeted below zero. This time, forecasters are predicting up to 15 inches of snow, as well as high tides and winds.

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Scott McGrath said people were in a "panic mode" in his Staten Island neighborhood, which was heavily damaged by Hurricane Sandy. He stood in line at a gas station Thursday night, hoping to get fuel for his generator to power his home in the case of an outage, but he walked away empty-handed. On Friday, people lined up again.

"It's like a nightmare of Sandy all over," he said, noting the constant weather alerts warning of snow and high tides. "This time our house is not ... in full shape, you know, who knows if (it) would withstand it."

For those sheltering in place like McGrath, 45, and his wife, Dee, the ever-changing weather makes recovery from Sandy a stop-start process. They have scuttled plans to put up sheet rock this weekend in their gutted two-story home — where they still have holes in the walls on the first floor. They’re also fearful that the few remaining personal items they have, which they had put in the basement, could be in danger due to the threat of high tides.

"We're ... sitting on the edge and just praying for the best," he said. "If this storm hits, we're screwed. That's the bottom line. If it really does hit us like they're saying, and that high tide comes in, only God knows what's going to happen to us."

A mix of snow and rain was falling in the city by 7 a.m.

NBCNewYork.com reported lines of up to 40 cars at some gas stations. The city had 250,000 tons of salt at the ready for the roads.

"This is a very serious storm, and we should treat it that way," said Tom Prendergast, president of the agency that runs New York subways and buses.

New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg warned people to stay in and to use public transportation if they had to go out, although even that carried the possibility of disruptions.

That was the plan for Tom Dillon, 46, who has almost completed repairing the flood damage on his two-story home in Breezy Point, a coastal enclave in the city that was hard hit by Sandy.

Dillon got his son out of school and stocked up on wood, kindling and blankets, plus bought five gallons of gas for his generator. He has also pulled out the snow shovels and has a kerosene heater at the ready.

"We ain’t taking no chances this time. … I got everything ready," he chuckled. "I want to get the generator on and I want to make sure everything's rocking and rolling. That's what I’m doing today, making sure everything's ready for this storm."

He is concerned about coastal flooding posing one more worry for the community, where extreme high tides were typical in Nor'easters, he said. In the first weeks after Sandy, residents in the low-lying area were constantly pumping out their basements.

"Every time we have coastal flooding, it's just a nightmare in this area because we're so low that … your basements get flooded again,” he said. "Anybody who has a basement’s going to get flooded, and you know, they’ll be pumping out again."

Despite all of his preparations and laughing about the incoming storm, Dillon sounded an exasperated note.

"I am wondering if Mother Nature is just mad at us or something," he said, before going to help a neighbor insulate his pipes to help protect against freezing. "Twelve to 18 inches of snow, oh, I don't know if I'm ready for this, really I'm not."

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Some 35,000 buildings and homes have been added to flood zones in parts of New York City, according to preliminary maps released Monday by the Federal Emergency Management Agency. More of these maps will be released in late February for Manhattan and other parts of city where the data is still being analyzed. 

The numbers emerged after the release earlier in the day of FEMA’s advisory flood maps for parts of the city, increasing the areas falling into 100-year flood zones or areas with the potential for destructive high speed waves along coastlines, said agency spokesman Dan Watson. More maps will be released for other parts of the city, including Manhattan, in late February, he said. 

The official maps will be released in the summer, but the preliminary ones for hard-hit areas like Staten Island and Queens are intended to give those who are rebuilding a head start. Sandy struck Oct. 29, leaving about 20,000 residential buildings in the city with some damage or disruption to their utilities.

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“It can inform building back stronger and smarter with the recovery,” Watson said. “And honestly it will also help save lives and property in the future … because we’ve seen areas where folks have elevated or used other forms of mitigation and … they got wet but there wasn’t as much damage as a result of it.” 

The maps reflect base flood elevations and will likely increase insurance rates for those who are newly included in the flood-prone zones. Those who are now in the “A Zones” -- or 100-year flood zones, where a flooding event has a one percent probability of occurring in any given year -- and who have a federally-backed mortgage will be required to get flood insurance once the flood maps are formally adopted, Watson said.

Some property owners may also have to elevate their buildings or homes, likely setting ground floors ground floors 3 to 6 feet higher than zoning rules previously required, according to The Associated Press. The maps have to be adopted by communities, which can appeal parts of them, Watson said.

Congress has already passed $9.7 billion in additional borrowing authority for the National Flood Insurance Program to help pay Sandy claims from homeowners in New York and New Jersey. The Senate on Monday night approved a $50.5 billion emergency spending bill to aid people in New York and New Jersey who are trying to rebuild their homes and businesses.

Hard-hit communities were just beginning to figure out what these initial maps mean for them. In Breezy Point, a private cooperative in the city’s southern Queens Borough heavily damaged by the storm, leaders said they needed to study the maps before offering guidance: “Keep in mind that the DOB (Department of Buildings) and City still need to make decisions regarding building criteria and if it will change.”

STATEN ISLAND, N.Y. -- Dee and Scott McGrath were huddled under two blankets, both wearing hooded sweatshirts and pants, with an electric heater by their bed. Dee heard her daughter coughing through the night from the room next door and feared she was getting sick.

Though they’d tried to cover up the open gaps between the wood on the first floor of their gutted home, which was inundated by 11 feet of water during Hurricane Sandy, the chill of a deep freeze sweeping New York was seeping in. Downstairs, it was just under 20 degrees. Upstairs, where they’ve restored heat, it was only 60, the couple said as they recounted the Wednesday night experience.

The McGraths are not alone in their suffering: Though the number of those living without heat is a hard number for officials to gauge, more than 9,000 dwellings remain without electricity in the city, according to data from the area's power companies.

“It’s rough, it’s very stressful, it’s very depressing. And you get the anxiety of not knowing when your work is going to be done and when your house is going to be back,” Scott, 45, said Thursday afternoon, taking a break from working on the electrical wiring in his home. “You have emotional-like panic attacks in your head, you’re thinking of what you have to do next to make sure your family don’t die or get sick with the flu and stuff … you can’t be exposed outdoors all day and this is being exposed outdoors.”

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Some 20,000 residential buildings in the city were left with some damage or disruption to their utilities after Sandy. A city program, mostly funded by the Federal Emergency Management Agency, had restored utility services and provided replacement equipment to more than 11,800 residences as of Jan. 21, while some 7,000 are awaiting help. Work on about 1,900 dwellings is under way.

The McGraths moved back in two weeks after the storm, but they only got heat on Jan. 2. Before then, they had been running nine to a dozen electric heaters off two generators at a cost of $80 a day. Until this weekend, they had to take showers and use the toilet at a neighbor’s home.

“My poor daughter is sick in bed right now running a fever and I have to have an electric heater running for her besides my heat,” he said of Crystal, 21, a meter reader for one of the city’s power providers, Con Edison of New York. Upstairs the thermostat showed it was 60 degrees. “It’s pretty sad and she’s wrapped up in two blankets.”

Although the McGraths’ home received help from the Rapid Repairs program, a first-of-its-kind collaboration between FEMA and local agencies, Scott said the program’s subcontractors had botched the installation work, with leaks springing in the pipes when the boiler was turned on. His brother, a plumber, fixed the problems.

They got electricity earlier, on Christmas Eve. But the work done by Rapid Repairs was “basic,” Scott said, leaving them with few outlets, such as just two in the kitchen. He was installing more outlets on Thursday before eventually putting up insulation and dry wall.

The couple has done almost all of the repair work on their own, finishing the bathroom downstairs, with a shower and toilet, this weekend. Though it was an achievement they had looked forward to, the timing couldn’t have been worse with the onset of the subzero temps this week. 

“It is completely unbearable to step foot out of my bedroom,” said Dee Young-McGrath, 42. “It’s like torture to sit on an ice-cold toilet. And the shower, I mean, we have holes in the wall back there … it’s just excruciating.”

The couple, who have lived in the home for 10 years, said they stayed for several reasons, including that FEMA housing options were either too far away or in troubled city neighborhoods, and many places wouldn’t take dogs. They have a 10-year-old dog, Brownie, a chocolate lab and border collie mix.

“Their (FEMA) answer was to tell me to put my dog in a shelter. That is my family. … I’d rather sleep in my car before I put my dog in a shelter,” Scott said as he called a tail-wagging Brownie “Daddy’s little girl.”

They also stayed since it's their home and because they’d heard stories of vandalism.

“Whatever I have left, I want to keep,” he said. “You stay here to protect your property, what’s left.”

Though the days are long and dark for them, there was a little levity when Katie jokingly offered a reporter a cold drink. One wall on the first floor is lined with bottles of water, a two-liter orange soda and a few energy drinks.

Katie said they were lucky to have a roof over their heads when others still did not and were sheltering at warming centers, but they both said the stress and depression has been great.

Scott said on some days he could not motivate himself to get out of bed and his hands would tremble when he was overcome with anxiety. They have been given sick leave from their jobs at Con Edison, where he is an investigative inspector and she an instructor, due to the emotional toll. The cold, with a forecast that it may snow on Friday or over the weekend, is making it even worse.

“I have … panic attacks, anxiety at night, wondering what’s going to happen to my house. You know, running electric heaters, I start to panic, thinking that I’m going to cause a fire,” Scott said, noting he also worried about the possibility of pipes breaking in the freezing weather.

“This is not a way (for) a person to live,” he said. “It’s depressing to come here every day and you’re living in this house.”

NBC Nightly News' Katy Tur contributed to this report.

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BREEZY POINT, N.Y. -- A first-of-its-kind home repair program pioneered by the federal government and local agencies has made thousands of New York City homes livable since Hurricane Sandy, but thousands of other homeowners are still waiting for help, and growing more frustrated with each passing day.

“Nobody communicates anything to you,” said Joe Casale, a 52-year-old service engineer who lives in Breezy Point with his wife, Katie, and three sons. “I have to keep on calling up and busting people’s chops to find out what’s going on. It’s ridiculous. … It’s not rapid for one. We started up on Nov. 15 and they’re just getting around to us now. … They held us back a good month I would say.”

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Despite assessments like Casale's, the Federal Emergency Management Agency, widely vilified for its response after Hurricane Katrina in 2005, has mostly avoided a similar public relations disaster in the wake of Sandy. FEMA officials say that’s at least partly due to the Rapid Repairs program, aimed at getting victims back home quickly so they can focus on rebuilding.

The program, which provides free utility repairs and replacement equipment like water heaters and boilers to qualified homeowners, has restored services to more than 11,800 residences in New York City, officials say. Work is under way on about 1,900 more dwellings.

Two neighboring New York counties and two New Jersey communities are also running the same program, which they call STEP (Sheltering and Temporary Essential Power).

While the idea of Rapid Repairs initially received positive reviews, critics say the execution has been far from flawless. Nearly three months after the Oct. 29 storm, some 7,000 New York City households have not yet received help through the program.

That assessment is echoed by those still waiting, who tell stories of canceled or missed appointments, improperly installed equipment and a disorganized bureaucracy where their complaints fall on deaf ears. 

Barry Fischer, a 45-year-old electrician who also lives in this coastal New York City enclave with his wife, Christina, and their five children, called the program “nonexistent,” noting they had been waiting since mid-November for electrical work and a hot water heater. 

His wife, a 35-year-old college professor, said she had been going to the Rapid Repairs’ offices every day to find out when the workers would come to her home. She also made dozens of calls, chased contractors’ trucks through her neighborhood on foot and in her car, and one time even tried to cut them off and block them in with her vehicle in order to force a conversation. 

The final straw came last week, when she met a Rapid Repairs’ worker looking for a nearby home that is only occupied in the summer.

“I was really freaking out,” she said. “… And that’s terrible. Why should somebody be really that crazy in order to get assistance?”

Officials overseeing the program acknowledge there have been missteps and say they understand the frustration building among those who still don’t have basic utilities. But they defend the premise of Rapid Repairs -- that residents can rebuild their homes much more quickly when they are living in them -- and vow to learn from the mistakes, some of which resulted from their efforts to act decisively.

The program was launched two weeks after the storm struck, leaving about 20,000 residential buildings in the city with some damage or disruption to their utilities.

“We thought that with some basic repair work … that would enable families to basically shelter in place, be in their homes, be safe and then begin the real work of rebuilding and doing it in their communities not away from (them),” Cas Holloway, deputy mayor for operations, told NBC News. “We wanted to move fast.”

For many Sandy victims, that’s what happened.

Nine general contractors hired by the city, who in turn have more than 100 subcontractors working with them, had completed repairs on more than 6,800 buildings, comprising 11,800 residential units, as of Jan. 21, according to the mayor’s Office of Housing Recovery. Crews had started work on about 1,900 others.

About 3,000 other households opted out of the program for various reasons, including not wanting to wait for repairs, Holloway said, leaving fewer than 7,000 residences still waiting.

Homeowners had from Nov. 13 through Jan. 14 to sign up for the pilot program. The city will eventually submit the bill to FEMA, which preliminarily authorized spending of up to $500 million and is expected to reimburse between 80 percent and 90 percent of the cost.

The cost for each household is supposed to be about $10,000, though it could go higher depending on the work required, said Michael Byrne, the senior FEMA official in New York state for the Sandy response and recovery.

FEMA: What the program covers

FEMA said it no longer uses the ubiquitous travel trailers that were deployed to temporarily house thousands of Katrina victims, and Holloway and Byrne said mobile homes weren’t viable in the densely-populated urban environment of New York City. They also carry a hefty price tag of $250,000, and take months to set up, they said.

Those already helped by the program said they're happy with the results.

Fran McCabe, who responded to an NBC News inquiry about the program on Facebook, wrote: “Waited for weeks but finally got a hot water heater and then a few weeks later got a new furnace. Work crews were WONDERFUL. … We're very grateful to the city for this program. It would have been much faster to do the repairs privately but the cost was a hardship for us at this time.”

But for families like the Fischers, whose children include a 7-year-old son who is severely hearing impaired and a 4-year-old daughter with Charcot Marie Tooth Disease, a common nerve disorder that can make it hard to walk, and apraxia, a speech disorder, the intended jumpstart has proven to be a roadblock.

They still don’t have central heat, hot water or working toilets in their two-story home, which forced them to sign a one-year rental agreement on a house in Jackson Heights in northern Queens. They’ve had to dip into Barry’s 401(k) savings, since the FEMA rental aid doesn’t cover their entire rent, and they have to pay their mortgage and co-op fees on a home they can’t live in. Adding to the financial strain: Their insurance will cover just one-third of the $300,000 cost to rebuild. 

'Why ... all this insanity?'
While the city has an “active high priority list” for residents in the greatest need of shelter, including the elderly and disabled, and Christina had informed the program many times about her disabled children, she found out last week that they weren’t on it.

Finally, a Rapid Repairs’ plumber showed up with a new boiler last Friday, Christina Fischer said. In the days since, electricians have done most of the wiring though there is still no heating system for the first floor.

“I don’t understand why a family with disabled children would have had to go through all this insanity in order to get this done when this was the whole kind of point of the program … to help the people who needed it most from the get-go,” she said. “It came to me going there every day, me becoming very threatening for it to get done, and I think that’s really, really unfortunate.”

Holloway, the deputy mayor of operations, and Byrne, of FEMA, acknowledge that there were challenges getting the pilot program up and running, which led to some delays.

Holloway said they switched from a “first-in, first-out” service model to a block-by-block method in order to avoid “wasting half a shift in transport.” They also had to order equipment and set up staging areas for it that were easy for contractors to access.

“There have been a lot of challenges setting this up,” he said, noting it was “unfortunate” some of the people who signed up early “probably have now had to wait longer than really they expected to and more than we would have liked them to.”

Holloway said the work has accelerated as the process has improved, noting that for a recent three-week period crews had worked on 100 homes a day on average. He said the program also is less expensive per household than mobile homes, though he could not say how much money the overall city bill will be.

Despite the problems, Byrne and Holloway both say they believe it could become a model for disaster response.

“I think it will end up being pretty remarkable that families are back in much faster than they might have been under a different model where you might … go rent a place for a year and then come back,” Holloway said. “… That is a terrible option for a homeowner and a family, and it’s terrible for a neighborhood.”

David Abramson, deputy director of Columbia University’s National Center for Disaster Preparedness, said he was initially impressed with the Rapid Repairs’ concept because it addressed some key barriers facing communities when they begin the recovery process, such as having credentialed and trusted contractors.

But he said execution of the program has been spotty.

“I certainly don’t want to throw them under the bus so quickly because they’re having a lot of hiccups in the initial phase,” he said, “(but) they’re clearly having major issues.”  

“I think it falls in the category of good plan, poor implementation,” he added.  

In the suburban New York City counties of Suffolk and Nassau, where the STEP program was announced in mid-November, more than 540 homes had been repaired by Jan. 15, out of some 2,350 households that signed up, according to FEMA.

The STEP program also is operating in two coastal New Jersey communities: Sea Bright, where 115 property owners have signed up, and in Ocean City, where enrollment data was not available.

Sea Bright Mayor Dina Long told NBC News work there is expected to begin in mid-March. A town meeting last week addressed STEP, and she said people were "grateful (for the program), they want to come home." Very few residents have insurance settlements, or they've come in much lower than their losses, leaving many of them in limbo.

“Sandy devastated this little town,” she said. “We lost every business, 75 percent of our homes are not habitable. It’s a ghost town. ... Almost three months later, we are not getting very far. And so something like STEP at least gives us a chance to start moving back to the recovery.”

But some of those in New York City who are just beginning to receive help from Rapid Repairs said they wish they had never waited on it.

Casale, the Breezy Point engineer, had to take a loan from his brother-in-law to help cover repairs he and his wife started on their own.

They’ve done most of the electrical work, but with no heat and water, paint wouldn't dry and they couldn’t get someone to work on their kitchen due to the cold. 

They finally received a hot water heater and a boiler on Jan. 11, but after the installation was finished the boiler began leaking and shorted out the electronic controls on Monday. They’re now waiting for a replacement part to arrive. 

“It was one big fiasco after another,” Katie Casale, 49, a personal assistant at an insurance company, said Tuesday. 

On top of that, Joe Casale found out from Rapid Repairs on Monday that the contractor had already submitted a bill saying the work was complete.

“I’m paying rent and I’m paying a mortgage for three months, so how rapid is rapid?” he said. “It’s not a rapid repair. … We wanted to get back in here.”

Like the Casales, Christina Fischer said her family wishes they hadn't had to rely on the program. 

“Very few of us would have waited for Rapid Repairs if we all had the money to do this, but we don’t,” she said. The program is “a great idea … but winter’s upon us and it’s not done.”  

Related:

Superstorm Sandy: Residents consider future as demolitions begin in Breezy Point

Sandy-struck Breezy Point facing 'greatest historical challenge'

Sandy victims on the move, but temporary housing 'will never be ... home'

Full coverage of Sandy's aftermath from NBC News