John Makely / NBC News

Six months after Superstorm Sandy slammed into the Jersey Shore, a heavily damaged home in Mantoloking sits untouched.

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.

“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.

John Makely / NBC News

Karly Carrozza and her husband, Anthony, can't start the rebuilding in Brick Township, N.J., until FEMA's flood zone map -- and the guidelines that come with it -- are finalized.

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.

John Makely / NBC News

Kieran and Jennifer Burke, with 2-year-old Kieran Jr., visit the lot where their home stood before it burned to the ground the night that Hurricane Sandy hit.

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.”

Miranda Leitsinger / NBC News

Georgia Fischer, 5, sifts sand with beach toys. She has Charcot Marie Tooth Disease, a common nerve disorder that can make it hard to walk, and apraxia, a speech disorder. Her parents had to re-arrange therapy and classes for her in the wake of the storm.

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.”

Related:

Slideshow: Then and now in Breezy Point

For subway station devastated by Sandy, road to recovery just beginning

Six months after Sandy, Atlantic City is betting on a comeback

 Updated at 4:30 p.m. ET: A gusting winter storm buried parts of the Northeast under 3 feet of snow and left millions of people with little to do Sunday but wait — for lights to come on, flights to resume and packed-in cars to be freed.

Transportation systems slowly flickered back. New York airports reopened on limited schedules, and around 11 p.m. Saturday night Boston’s Logan International Airport welcomed in its first flight since the storm hit. All major airports are operational again, but many in the affected area are still experiencing delays and cancellations.

Still, for the most part, the country’s most populous region came to a standstill for a day. Elected officials pleaded with people to stay inside, even after the snow stopped, to let emergency crews and snowplows do their work.

Full coverage from The Weather Channel

“This is going to go on for a number of days,” Connecticut Gov. Dannel Malloy said. “This will not all be done today.”

Gov. Lincoln Chafee of Rhode Island warned that while it was no longer snowing, the danger hadn't ended.

"People need to take this storm seriously, even after it's over. If you have any kind of heart condition, be careful with the shoveling," The Associated Press quoted him as saying.

The storm was blamed for at least 10 deaths, including a child poisoned by carbon monoxide and an 81-year-old Connecticut woman who was clearing snow with a blower who was struck and killed by a hit-and-run driver.

At 4:00 p.m. ET Sunday, 290,726 homes and businesses were without power in New York, Massachusetts, Rhode Island and Connecticut, down from a total of about 650,000. Some schools in the region said that they would be closed on Monday, according to the AP.

And along the coast, including among people battered by Superstorm Sandy less than four months ago, flooding was a concern. The snowstorm announced itself with hurricane-force winds and churned up offshore waters.

When the snow finally stopped Saturday afternoon, cities and towns reported eye-popping snow totals — 40 inches in Hampden, Conn., 38 inches in Milford, Conn., and 34 inches in New Haven. Portland, Maine, got almost 32 inches, breaking its record.

Boston reported a hair under 25 inches, placing the storm in that city’s five-worst on record. Concord, N.H., reported 2 feet. Central Park in New York — by afternoon a sledder’s paradise — reported 11.4 inches.

The National Weather Service recorded peak wind gusts of 83 mph in Cuttyhunk, Mass., the strength of a Category 1 hurricane. There were gusts of 72 mph in Westport, Conn., and 76 mph in East Boston.

On the Long Island Expressway, which looked more like a moonscape than a busy thoroughfare, 60 to 100 cars were stuck in the snow, and police officers worked through the night to free people from cars and get them to safety.

Richard Ebbrecht, a chiropractor, told the AP that he left his office in Brooklyn at 3 p.m. Friday and got stuck six or seven times on the expressway and other roads.

 “We were all helping each other, shoveling, pushing,” he said.

He gave up and settled in for the night just two miles from home. At 8 a.m., he walked the rest of the way.

 “I could run my car and keep the heat on and listen to the radio a little bit,” he told the AP. “It was very icy under my car. That’s why my car is still there.”

Among the 10 deaths blamed on the storm was an 11-year-old boy in Boston who was overcome by carbon monoxide while keeping warm in the car.

The boy had been helping his father shovel out the car and got cold. The father started the engine, and the boy got inside, a Boston fire spokesman told the AP. But the car’s exhaust pipe was covered by a snowbank.

In a separate incident, also in Boston, a 20-year-old man was found dead in his car. He was also overcome by carbon monoxide fumes.

In Auburn, N.H., a man was killed after losing control of his car and hitting a tree. He was found dead in his car by local authorities.

In Prospect, Conn., an 81-year-old woman was using a snowblower when a driver struck and killed her and fled the scene, Malloy said. In Danbury, a man slipped on a porch and was found dead Saturday morning, the mayor told NBC Connecticut.

A 53-year-old man in Bridgeport, Conn., was found dead under snow at his house, possibly from hypothermia or a cardiac arrest, authorities said. A 55-year-old New Milford man died after he suffered a heart attack while plowing. A Shelton man, 49, died while digging out his truck. 

A man in Livingston County, N.Y., was plowing his driveway with a tractor Friday night when the tractor went off the edge of the road and fell on top of him.

And in Poughkeepsie, N.Y., an 18-year-old woman lost control of her car in the snow and struck Muril M. Hancock, 74, who was walking near the shoulder, police said Friday. Hancock died at the hospital.

In New York, Mayor Michael Bloomberg said Saturday morning that 2,200 pieces of equipment were on the streets, salting and plowing. He said that all the primary streets in the city had been plowed.

 “I think it’s fair to say that we were very lucky,” he said. “Looks like we dodged a bullet.”

He said the city had offered help to other places hit harder by the storm.

In Massachusetts, Gov. Deval Patrick had ordered all cars off the roads but announced Saturday afternoon that he was lifting the ban for Interstate 91 and the slice of the state to the west.

Connecticut had a similar ban in place, but Malloy could not say when it might be lifted. He said Saturday afternoon that he expected it to remain in place at least for the rest of the day.

The winter storm was fueled by two weather systems — a so-called clipper pattern that swept across the Midwest and a band of rain that churned up from the South. They clashed explosively over the Northeast on Friday.

The storm arrived in earnest Friday night. The governors of New York, New Hampshire, Connecticut, Massachusetts and Rhode Island all declared states of emergency.

More than 800 National Guard soldiers and airmen were activated in Connecticut, Massachusetts and New York to provide roadway support, emergency transportation and back-up for first responders, the Department of Defense said.

Related:

'Absolutely beautiful' scene in Conn. town hit by most snow

Sandy survivors: It's like a repeat 'nightmare'  

The Weather Channel live blog

State-by-state impact of the storm

Current conditions

Mario Tama / Getty Images

NEW YORK, NY - FEBRUARY 06: New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg (L) speaks at a City Hall press conference on federal funds for Superstorm Sandy on February 6, 2013 in New York City.

Published 4:12 p.m. ET: New York City will use the first round of Superstorm Sandy relief to help residents repair homes, rebuild local businesses and use competition to spur development of storm resilient technology, Mayor Michael Bloomberg announced Wednesday.

Bloomberg laid out how the city will use the nearly $1.8 billion in initial aid to recover from the historic storm that ravaged parts of the East Coast in late October. The primary focus, he said at a press conference, is to help city residence repair their damaged property.

“We said at the very beginning that that was our real priority, to get people back in their homes. And we just made enormous progress,” said Bloomberg.  

This initial wave of funding is just the first round of aid the city hopes to receive from the $50 billion Hurricane Sandy relief package passed by Congress last month. The first installment of the package will total $5.4 billion, with New York State receiving $1.7 billion, $1.8 billion going to New Jersey, and the rest being split among Connecticut, Rhode Island and Maryland.

The $720 million set aside for housing recovery has also been designated for making low-income homes and apartments more storm resistant for future inclement weather.  Investments will also be made in permanent emergency generators public housing.   

Likewise, $185 will be set aside for business recovery, including $100 million in grants to local businesses.  Businesses that accept the aid will be required to reinvest in their New York City presence.  

Building off “Race to the Top,” a popular Department of Education initiative to spur innovation in American classrooms, the businessman turned mayor announced a $5-million competition for the most innovative and cost-effective ideas to produce storm resilient technologies that can be replicated throughout the city.   

 “You can’t have a neighborhood, you can’t live, if there aren’t local stores to get you jobs and buy local goods,” said Bloomberg. “So we want to make sure they recover and make themselves less vulnerable going forward.”

The third area the aid will go towards is making New York's infrastructure more resilient. A $40 million “Critical Utility Infrastructure Resiliency Competition” was announced to encourage development in storm resiliency measures.  A $100 million “Neighborhood Game-Changer Investment Competition” was also unveiled to spur ideas for long-term investment throughout New York City.

Bloomberg said the first round of relief was allocated to “to meet the most urgent needs of communities that sandy hit the hardest.” 

“We’re talking about the first stage of a plan that will bring a lot of relief to New York City,” he added.

Bloomberg said he expects the projects he announced Wednesday to be underway by early May.

Related:

Irish athletes help Breezy Point rebuild

Preliminary FEMA flood zone maps add 35,000 NYC buildings to flood zones

Michael Heiman / Getty Images file

The corner of 34th Street and 1st Street in Manhattan floods during rains from Hurricane Sandy, Oct. 29, 2012 in New York City.

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.

“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.”

David Friedman / NBC News file

Joe Casale, far right, watches workers remove debris from his flooded home in Breezy Point, N.Y., on Nov. 1.

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.”

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?”

David Friedman / NBC News

Christina Fischer plays with her disabled daughter Georgia, 4, and son Timothy, 7, who is severely hearing impaired, after school on Jan. 14 in Rockaway Beach, N.Y.

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.

Slideshow: Recovering after Sandy

Mario Tama / Getty Images

Residents of the Northeast are still picking up the pieces after Superstorm Sandy.

Launch slideshow

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.  

Lucas Jackson / Reuters

Cranes work to remove several feet of sand deposited on Ocean Avenue by Hurricane Sandy in Sea Bright, N.J., on Oct. 31.

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

John Makely / NBC News

Theresa Nugent, left, and her sister Geraldine Duke, salvage clothing from their flooded house in Breezy Point, N.Y. on Sunday, Nov. 18, 2012. They've just rented an apartment in Brooklyn that their sharing with their partners, two cats and two dogs, to weather the post-Sandy storm.

BREEZY POINT, N.Y. -- Three weeks after Hurricane Sandy forced Geraldine Duke and her sister, Theresa Nugent, out of their homes with four pets and just a few possessions, they have moved out of the airport motel room where they spent several weeks and into a two-bedroom apartment in Brooklyn.

But their hearts are still in the rubble that is their longtime neighborhood in Breezy Point.

“This is my home. That’s never going to be my home. Ever,” Duke, 46, said Sunday of the Brooklyn apartment, as she tried to clear a path through the debris clogging the Asian-themed garden outside of her sister’s Breezy Point bungalow.

Duke and Nugent, 48, who share their new apartment with their partners, are among the tens of thousands of residents of New Jersey and New York who have been forced to relocate in the aftermath of Sandy, straining community and family ties, breaking household budgets and adding an extra helping of stress by forcing them to search for housing.

It’s not clear how many are temporarily without homes as a result of the storm, but the Federal Emergency Management Agency said Tuesday it has provided more than $350 million in rental assistance to people in those states plus Rhode Island and Connecticut, with nearly 70 percent of that going to New Yorkers.

Overall, some 450,000 people in those four states have applied for housing aid that includes rental or repairs, with more than $820 million approved, FEMA said.

Governors of the two hardest-hit states, New Jersey and New York, have not requested mobile homes or trailers, though some have been stationed in the area in case they do, FEMA representatives said. In the meantime, the agency will provide up to 18 months’ rent for temporary housing while residences are being repaired, and is paying for motel and hotel stays for others displaced by the storm.

FEMA said it increased the rent allocation by 25 percent over the normal going rate in both states after it became apparent that the cost of rental units could become a limiting factor.

That should open up another 1,800 rental units in New York and another 1,200 in New Jersey, FEMA said.

“People know what the New York housing market was like anyway prior to Sandy. It’s merely stating the obvious that Sandy made it that much worse,” said William L. Rukeyser, a FEMA spokesman in New York.

And even with the increase, some victims told NBC News the initial payments were not enough to pay for an apartment in the tight New York City housing market, where the rental vacancy rate was only about 3 percent in 2011. Government figures show that in the city, the monthly rent provided could range from $1,500 to $2,655, while in Atlantic City, N.J., it could be from $1,020 to $2,360.

Unlike the Hurricane Katrina aftermath, when victims were widely dispersed to dozens of states, Sandy's victims are tending to stay locally, initially bunking with relatives or friends. But now they are searching for more permanent shelter as they begin the long process of cleaning or repairing their homes.

John Makely / NBC News

Breezy Point resident Liz Jordan stands in her ome, which was flooded by Hurricane Sandy on Oct. 29.

In communities like Breezy Point, where generations of families were often affected, parents, grandparents and kids are frequently forced to squeeze into a rental unit and commute to their damaged or destroyed homes.

Liz Jordan and her family, which called Breezy Point home until the storm flooded their house, is split up across New York. Jordan and her husband are staying with a friend in Staten Island, their daughter is living with a classmate who attends her Brooklyn high school, and their autistic son is upstate with friends so he can follow a familiar routine. 

Jordan, 57, came out of retirement a few weeks ago to take a job with the federal government. That job has become critical after the disaster, which also claimed all of her family's cars.

It takes Jordan and her husband, who is retired, hours to get to Breezy Point from Staten Island, and they’ve told their four adult children who want to come home to help that they can’t since they have nowhere to put them. But the long list of their tasks is manifold, with an apartment being just one more thing to do.

“We have to find a place to be a family again and just be together,” Jordan said.

They’ve also had to explain to their autistic 17-year-old son what happened to their community.

 “We need to get some place where the kids can get back to school, whether we have to drive them or not, you know, some place that’s safe, that we like,”  Jordan said.

Many storm victims share similar “conflicting realities,” said Rukeyser, the FEMA spokesman.

“People want to move into solid housing. They also want to stay as close as possible to their homes,” he said. “Depending on where they lived before Sandy, there may in fact not be available rentals in the locations that they would most prefer, and you know, that’s a real difficulty for families and they have to make, in some cases, hard decisions.”

For some storm victims, the uncertainty over how long they will be displaced and the time it would take traveling back and forth to their damaged homes are outweighed by a desire to begin rebuilding. So instead, they are camping out in their damaged homes, without light or heat, as temperatures dip into the 30s at night.

John Makely / NBC News

Tom Dillon makes coffee on the fire in his flood damaged Breezy Point home.

Among them is Tom Dillon, 46, who usually lives with his father-in-law, wife, son, daughter, four dogs, three cats and a turtle in a two-story home in Breezy Point.

Dillon, whose home was flooded the night of Oct. 29, has since ripped out the insulation and pulled up the floors. He sleeps for a few hours each night in a sofa chair in front of a crackling fire in his fireplace, which he also uses to boil tea, make coffee and noodles.

An electrician certified the second floor of his home to receive power last Thursday and he hopes that the lights will come on in the next few weeks. Most of his family is staying in New Jersey.

“Just trying to get my family back in here,” he said. “We just want to be home and that’s it. This is getting a little, getting a little hard, you know what I mean. We’re not together right now.”

In front of his home stands a sign, reading: "There will be no crisis this week ... my schedule is full!"

The family won’t mind being at home while the repairs are ongoing, he added: “We’re just going to have to live roughing it a little bit until the electricity’s on.”

Breezy Point’s cooperative said late Tuesday that a majority of the community was ready for electrical service hook-up, depending on a home’s ability to receive it as determined by an electrician. The gas service is being restored to many areas, too, though, like the electricity, that wouldn’t include the more than 100 homes destroyed in a fire triggered by Sandy or apparently those that have received a “red card,” meaning it’s unsafe to go inside.

For those whose homes are uninhabitable, the road back to Breezy Point looks like a long one. Dealing with home and auto insurers and FEMA, finding a temporary place to stay while returning to jobs, and sorting out mortgages and rental cars has put a strain on families.

John Makely / NBC News

Siobhan Foley, sweeps in front of the destroyed family home she shared with her mother, Terry, in Breezy Point, N.Y. on Sunday.

Terry Foley and her adult daughter, Siobhan, surveyed the damage to the two-story pink oceanfront home that had been in the family for nearly 50 years as they waited a third time for an insurance representative.

The house was ripped off its foundation by Sandy and pitched sideways. City inspectors have issued a red card for the home.

“I want everyone to come. I want them to tell us and then I want to bulldoze it because I can’t look at it anymore. I can’t, it’s horrible. I’d rather see a gaping hole than this,” Siobhan Foley, a teacher, said Sunday.

Her mother, who works in special education, lamented that she could not go inside to retrieve cherished items, such as her mother’s china.

“We have nothing,” Terry Foley said. “I’m sleeping on a toy blow-up bed that if you move, the pillow flies off, OK, and then I have one card table. Is that a life?”

They took a two-bedroom apartment in nearby Brooklyn because they were desperate, she said. But Siobhan Foley said sharing an apartment adds to the stress.

“Living in a house is one thing, together, but an apartment, not so much fun. I gotta be honest,” she said.

Many in Breezy Point said the thing they miss most by being displaced are the community ties. Some reminisced about meeting up for a drink at the local pubs or to watch a football game, while others said it could take hours to get home since you’d meet friends along the way.

“There’s one road that goes into this community. One road in, one road out. Everyone you see, you kind of know,” said Roy Currlin, 49, and Nugent’s boyfriend, who is sharing the apartment with Duke and her husband after his Breezy Point home flooded. “That sense of closeness is lost.”

They will try to re-create that atmosphere, many residents said, even though they fear the recovery could take a year or more.

Apart from the homes that burned down here, a number of others floated off their foundations, including one that came to rest on the deck of Nugent’s home.

Duke clipped plants and pulled weeds on Sunday as she cleaned her sister’s garden. They are trying to make the home accessible so they can get it inspected and begin the repairs, as they’ve been able to do with the home that Duke lived in nearby with her husband.

In the meantime, they’ve had to share the few clothes they have, sleep on air mattresses and tend to their mutual pets, including one – Rocky, a 2-year-old Cocker Spaniel – who has become anxious and fearful after the storm.

But despite the obvious losses, Nugent, who this past Sunday gathered some salvageable wet clothes from her home, said she had the most important things in their new place.

“I pretty much brought what I needed to make it feel like home, you know,” she said, “the people and the animals.”

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John Moore / Getty Images

Robert Munoz collects supplies from a mobile Red Cross unit on Nov. 7, in the Staten Island Borough of New York City.

The American Red Cross, which bills itself as “the world's largest humanitarian network,” is pushing back against critics of its response to superstorm Sandy, with the head of the organization saying its relief effort has been “near flawless” despite criticism from stranded storm victims and elected officials.

Two weeks after the storm slammed the East Coast, leaving millions of residents without power and in need of food, warmth and shelter, the venerable nonprofit has taken a public battering over what many victims and some officials saw as a lackluster and unfocused response. 

Thomas Donovan, a 43-year-old software salesman who was helping an elderly couple toss out heavy furniture and appliances from their flooded home last week in the hard-hit New York City community of Breezy Point, is among the disillusioned.

“Red Cross sucks," he said last week. "… I’m never giving them another dime.”

Red Cross officials have been trying to walk the fine line between diplomacy and defense in explaining why their Sandy relief efforts have not always been appreciated.

Laura Howe, a spokeswoman for the organization, said that responding in a badly damaged, densely populated urban area, and the unique cold-weather hurricane, both posed significant challenges to getting needed supplies to the hardest-hit areas.

But she also noted that the Red Cross has mounted its largest domestic disaster response in five years, deploying its entire fleet of more than 320 feeding trucks and sending nearly 6,000 relief workers to the devastated areas, mainly in New Jersey and New York.

We are “putting our resources where the need is greatest,” Howe said.

And Gail McGovern, chief executive officer and president of the Red Cross, told NBC News’ Lisa Myers late last week that the response has been timely and well-organized: “I think that we are near flawless so far in this operation.”

“I know that there are people who have absolutely lost everything, that are cold, that are frightened, that are saying, ‘Where is the American Red Cross?’ and I am totally supportive of that. I understand their cry for help, but we are out there,” she said.

When asked about the storm victims who are complaining that they haven't seen the Red Cross in their neighborhoods, McGovern said that the organization is using social media to help guide them to areas that they haven't yet reached. "We are looking at every single one of those cries for help, and we are moving people and supplies as quickly as we can," she said.

Slideshow: Recovering after Sandy

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A snowstorm hits the Northeast as residents are still struggling to pick up the pieces after Superstorm Sandy.

Launch slideshow

The role of public punching bag is not new for the Red Cross, which has endured similar criticism after disasters like Hurricane Katrina, which hammered the Gulf Coast in 2005. The organization and its response are often held under a microscope, though federal and state government, the military and many other relief groups, also assist in recovery efforts.

'People are frustrated'
Howe, the Red Cross spokeswoman, said the anger felt by victims is not surprising, given what they are going through.

“We understand that people are frustrated,” she said Friday. “Anybody who has been without power, who has had to deal with this level of damage in their homes for this period of time, is bound to be frustrated and we completely understand that. I would also say that this disaster is bigger than any one organization.”

As of Sunday, the Red Cross was sheltering some 3,700 people and had delivered more than 4.8 million meals or snacks, and more than 477,000 relief items, she said.

“We are doing everything that we possibly can to be in as many places as quickly as possible but this is a big operation and we’re up against a large geography and a large number of people that need to be served,” she added.

Such arguments don’t seem to carry much weight in communities severely affected by the storm. 

James Molinari, president of the hard-hit Staten Island borough of New York City, on Nov. 1 labeled the organization’s response there “an absolute disgrace” and went so far as to urge its residents not to donate to the largely volunteer agency.

Donovan, the Red Cross critic helping in Breezy Point, said he and his friends have been helping clean up there for about a week and had worked on some 30 homes. The Brooklyn resident, whose family has had a house in Breezy Point since he was a kid, said he had seen only one of the group’s trucks there in that time.

“You don’t see them. They’re not here ... they’re just not here,” he said Thursday, a day after a nor’easter blew ashore, pushing another storm surge into water-logged areas and dumping about four inches of snow. 

Other residents are more understanding.

John Makely / NBC News

Medeleine Dobriner, 66, of New Dorp, is at her third Red Cross shelter since Hurricane Sandy left her homeless.

At a nearby center being used to collect and hand out free food and cleaning supplies, 25-year-old Lauren Willis of nearby Roxbury said that she saw no sign of the Red Cross in the first days after Sandy hit on Oct. 29, flooding both her and her parents’ homes. Since then, however, it has been a regular, helpful presence in her community.

“We were down here for four days and we had nothing, I mean nothing. … We didn’t have any hot food” or water, said Willis, an emergency medical technician whose mother is a Red Cross volunteer. “Now they’ve come in, they’re doing great work.”

Getting the word out about a Red Cross presence in areas where communications are still in disarray after the storm also may feed the perception that the organization is absent. The organization said it was listing on its website the specific streets and communities where workers will be, but of course many storm victims still lack power, let alone Internet access.

A reporter saw a Red Cross mental health specialist in Breezy Point in the immediate aftermath of Sandy, and a few days later a Red Cross minitrailer was parked in the community. The organization’s website listed several visits to the community through Sunday.  

But, like Donovan, many residents interviewed over the last two weeks said they have not seen the Red Cross since the storm. 

On Thursday, Red Cross volunteers Mary Gagnon and her husband, Dean, drove down Breezy Point’s main road, stopping to offer ham-and-cheese or roast beef sandwiches. The couple, both 65 and retired, are unpaid volunteers who drove a Red Cross minitrailer from Madison, Wis., to help out.

How you can help in Sandy's aftermath

“We’re out here. We’re all around. We’re everywhere,” said Mary Gagnon, noting that she and her husband rotate between communities at the direction of a central dispatch.

The Red Cross has raised some $117 million in the aftermath of the disaster, though officials say they can’t yet say how much has been spent on the relief effort. Calculating spending is complicated, because bills are still coming in and some services are covered by ongoing contracts, but Howe promised there would be a full accounting at the end of the response effort.

Charity Navigator, a nonprofit charity rating agency that aims to be a guide to intelligent giving, said the Red Cross received three out of four stars this year -- meaning it met most industry standards -- down from four the year before. Their ratings cover financial accountability and overall transparency.

Sandy effort a 'key indicator'
Its president and CEO, Ken Berger, said his analysts have seen a slight decline in the Red Cross’ finances, such as fundraising efficiency. He also noted its working capital, equivalent to a “rainy day” fund, is not as large as they would like it to be.

“For an organization of this size and scale that’s somewhat unique in its expertise and reach, that they may not always be as fast as we’d like, they may not always be as responsive as we’d like, but … we think they’re overall performance at this point is OK,” Berger said.

“There’s still this lingering sense since Katrina that Red Cross still has some work to do to redeem its reputation,” he added, noting the Sandy response may prove to be a “key indicator” of whether it has improved sufficiently.

Howe said the Red Cross was proud of their latest work but “would like it to be more perfect.”

To that end, it is making an intensive push into some of the most hard-hit areas in New York and elsewhere through Monday. Volunteers will climb the stairs of apartment blocks to hand out relief items, like a heated “shower in a bag,” hand warmers, garbage bags and work gloves, she said.

“While some people still need the blankets and the hand warmers, we’ve got others who are very much in the process of mucking out homes and they need the work gloves and the (dust) masks,” Howe said. “We’re really trying to make sure that we address that wide range of need that’s out there.”

But, Fran Menchini, 79, who plans to engage a private contractor to clean her flooded home in Breezy Point, said she doesn’t think the Red Cross had anything to offer her.

“I saw them up at FEMA (a claim center outside Breezy Point),” she said. “What would they do? Were they offering anything? No. I need services, I don’t need them to give me coffee.”

NBC News' Senior Investigative Correspondent Lisa Myers and Producer Talesha Reynolds contributed to this report.

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