“Total disaster — like 11 feet of water altogether,” said Tareste Etienne, 56, a former cabdriver disabled by a heart ailment, who more recently worked as a street vendor to help support his four children. The flood destroyed his whole stock.

“Everything is finished,” he said last week at the LaGuardia Airport Hotel, after hunting in vain for a store in the area where he could use food stamps to feed the family. He looked shellshocked as he watched his youngest, Cedric, 7, sleeping on a real bed for the first time in weeks in a hotel room that they will have to vacate on Dec. 2.

Their landlady rescued them before the storm, he said, providing two unheated rooms with no way to cook. As the dimensions of the disaster unfolded, they moved to cots in a warm hallway of an evacuation center at York College in Queens, grateful for hot meals. But on Nov. 6 they were roused in the night, herded onto buses with hundreds of others and left at the Franklin Avenue Armory in the Bronx.

“It’s like you were being processed to go to jail,” Mr. Etienne said, echoing many others who described waiting for hours in the cold to enter a vast sea of cots under constant fluorescent lights, with one shower for everybody and one toilet for men, where guards yelled into two-way radios all night and, Mr. Etienne and a Salvation Army official said, a couple had sex in the open.

On the third day, the family fled back to the landlady’s cold rooms, then started over at another high school evacuation center. By then, the remaining evacuees included children with autism and elderly and disabled people, many from nursing homes and halfway houses.

Mr. Diamond defended the decision to turn to social service contractors to open drill floors a week after the storm, when 4,000 people were still in evacuation centers, down from 7,000. (There are now just over 1,100, nearly all in hotels, but the cold-weather influx is still to come.) He would not respond to specific complaints about conditions or about treatment by staff members.