“The water’s down a lot, but everything in it is totally lost,” Ms. Neizer said, referring to her home. “We live on his checks. We have no money for cleaning supplies, nowhere to sleep.”

Ms. Neizer knew she would have to clean up the house on her own, because Mr. Sevigny is not well enough to help. Her clothes were wet. Before long, they would be a moldy mess. “I have no way of cleaning them,” she said. “My washer was under water.”

What’s more, much of what the couple had bought with their monthly food-stamp allotment was rotting in the fridge. “I just don’t know what we’re going to do,” Ms. Neizer said. “We can go to the food pantries, but we have no transportation.”

Woes piled up. Ms. Neizer was not sure if her home would be safe to live in by the time the shelter closed. She did not have bus fare to get home. And she could not make any calls, because her phone was drenched in the flood.

Ms. Neizer took a drag of a cigarette and admitted she was unsure of their next chapter, but said, “We’ll be O.K.”

For Tess Peel, the waiting was the worst part.

It’s not that Irma didn’t scare the wits out of her and her partner, Jim Wallace, at their mobile home in North Fort Myers. During the height of the storm on Sunday, Mr. Wallace was holding on to the frame of their screened porch to keep it from being blown apart. And Ms. Peel was pacing, clutching her father’s rosary beads and praying.

But as they and a few neighbors in their 55-plus community gathered on Tuesday for grilled ribs and beer — for them, the loss of electricity was Irma’s biggest legacy — Ms. Peel had no doubt about what had made her most anxious.

“It was the waiting,” she said. “Waiting for it to come and not knowing what it was going to be. We didn’t know if it was going to be a Cat 5.”