LONGMONT — After floodwaters tore through their homes and lives in the middle of September, thousands of Coloradans are still financially treading water well into November.

They wait on undersized insurance checks and limited government money, and flood victims such as Rose Womack say they’re just trying to stay afloat.

“I’ve sunk to begging,” said Womack, sitting in a new patio chair on the bare concrete floor that used to be her living room. Her home of 19 years on Wade Road in Longmont sits a quarter-mile uphill from the St. Vrain River. Her home had never come close to flooding before.

Her losses are at least $30,000. Federal Emergency Management Agency inspectors looked at her ruined appliances and furniture and issued her a check for about $9,000, which will help make her home a cheap replica of what it was.

Her losses are almost entirely uninsured.

Womack’s search for help is reflected in thousands of homes across the flood zone, as victims humble themselves to charity, take out loans, cash in stocks and drain their retirements to get back to where they were before the rain started falling.

Flood insurance and relief money, by design, will pay only to make their homes “livable and safe,” but not comfortable or attractive.

The state Office of Emergency Management said just over 27,000 structures were damaged or destroyed. FEMA will pay a maximum of $31,900 per claim to those without insurance, and fewer than 1 in 13 were insured.

Jerre Stead, the state’s chief recovery officer, said the average assistance payout so far has been about $6,000.

Through Wednesday, insurance had paid an average of $20,325 on the 1,323 claims, according to the National Flood Insurance Program, which underwrites all the policies. The flood produced a total of 2,060 claims from the 22,013 policies sold statewide.

Standard homeowners policies cover fires, tornadoes and every natural disaster except floods and earthquakes, said Carole Walker, executive director of the Rocky Mountain Insurance Information Association.

“It makes you appreciate how comprehensive insurance for fires is, including the value of the homes and the contents,” she said. “It’s very comprehensive. Unfortunately, the limits of flood insurance is a national dilemma.”

While the average payout for the September flood is about $22,000 per claim, the average for private insurance in June’s Black Forest fire in El Paso County was nearly $81,000 on 3,630 home and auto claims.

The emotional tollWomack wasn’t in the floodplain, so she didn’t buy insurance, figuring the few hundred dollars a year would be an unnecessary bite out of her monthly disability check.

The 54-year-old has debilitating arthritis in her spine, which forced her to leave work as an admissions clerk at Boulder Community Hospital three years ago.

In her home, Womack takes care of her 79-year-old mother, who has diabetes and the onset of dementia.

Since the flood, Womack has slept on her son’s couch, next to the crate that houses her two beloved dachshunds. Her mother sleeps on a cot in an office upstairs in the home in Henderson, where her son and pregnant daughter-in-law are raising a 22-month-old daughter.

Her son works six days a week at his computer job. Womack’s eyes get moist as she describes the sound of him leaving home before daylight to get in a few hours restoring her home before he goes to work.

“Thank God my son knows how to do drywall,” she said looking at her new walls.

She will try to stretch her FEMA money and a few hundred dollars she’s gotten from church donations as far as she can. That means the cheapest furniture, cabinets and carpet she can find. Then she’ll humble herself on Facebook and post another round of pleas for volunteers, extended family and friends to get them installed.

“You choose your battles — What can I afford to fix now? — and the rest of it has to wait,” she said.

Chores and worry are constantly overwhelming. Womack said, adding that she’s glad her mother doesn’t seem to grasp the gravity of their situation.

At times as she talks, Womack rests her forehead. She recounts the day her heart raced and pain numbed her arm as she pulled to the side of the road. She feared a heart attack.

“I thought, ‘After all this, is this where I’m going to die — sitting beside the Home Depot?’ ” Womack said.

Insurance limitsThough Womack never bought flood insurance, some who did are disappointed in the results.

Mark Johnson, a photography instructor in Boulder, has paid about $450 a year in premiums for more than five years, though his home is just outside the floodplain.

Sewage backed up and flooded his basement. Johnson and his wife both work from home, so it’s a business disruption in addition to a living nightmare.

Johnson was denied any FEMA aid because he had flood insurance, which he expects to pay him about $35,000 for the damage — eventually. Another $40,000 will come out of his own pocket, he said.

While a lot of work has started to restore his home, Johnson is still waiting on an insurance check to pay him back. When the insurance does come through, his mortgage company intends to hold on to it for two weeks, then give him one-third for the work he’s done, another third if he demonstrates he’s halfway through and the rest when the work is done, he said.

But if the money doesn’t come soon, Johnson and his wife will be cashing out retirement funds just to get by, he said.

Nearly all of the losses in his finished basement were uninsured by both his flood and homeowners policies. And because the floor above it is about a foot below the grade of the ground, that means a second floor of his four-story home also was mostly uninsured.

“In other words, we are being told that lower areas, where water naturally travels, are either uncovered or barely covered,” he said. “This makes us question why we were sold a flood insurance policy in the first place.

“I have nothing but sympathy for the folks who don’t have insurance and have lost everything,” he said, “yet we have been investing in flood insurance and still are only covered enough to leave us with two completely empty levels in our home.”

Barbara Fitzpatrick, senior floodplain specialist for FEMA, said people with uninsured losses can apply for FEMA help after their insurance claims are settled. The deadline to apply for FEMA aid is Nov. 30. The last day to file insurance claims, however, is Nov. 14.

Insurance rates vary by location and risk, and customers can buy insurance ranging from minimal coverage at $129 in areas rated as low or moderate risks. The average policy, however, costs about $650 a year, according to the National Flood Insurance Program.

Fitzpatrick said renters and homeowners can buy the amount of coverage they can afford up to $250,000 in coverage, but it’s up to each customer to review their policy to make sure it’s adequate.

It takes a separate flood policy to cover contents, however.

“We don’t do the pretties,” Fitzpatrick said.

Kindness of strangersWhere the government has come up short, volunteers and donors have pitched in with manual labor and generous donations.

On Oct. 27, Dave Matthews headlined a concert in Broomfield that raised more than $680,000 for flood victims. Scores of businesses, churches and sports teams have raised money, as well.

Stead, the chief recovery officer, said donations, including the Broomfield show, totaled more than $15 million.

The Colorado United website suggests ways people can donate or get help, though much of the effort soon shifts to the United Way, a spokeswoman said.

Lou and Grace Davis, both 73, weren’t at their weekend home in Drake when the floods came, but the tenants in their three rental properties nearby fled with their lives.

They returned along a rocky creek bed that used to be their road to retrieve their things and help out the Davises, who lost everything, said tenant Heather McGurn, who cleans vacation properties for a living.

“We’re really going to miss it,” she said of the Davis property. “It was so peaceful there.”

The Davises had no flood insurance and still have no idea how much, if any, FEMA will help.

“They talked to us, but they’re not going to help us, not really,” said Lou, a retired grocery store worker, dismissing the questions about his losses.

They have gotten more help from friends and strangers.

About 30 people from Massachusetts-based All Hands Volunteers have provided massive amounts of free help to clear the property and make it safe, the Davises said, praising the assistance.

“We try to seek out where the gaps are between insurance and FEMA help,” said Nathan Heath, the volunteer group’s team leader for Colorado. “If it’s just mucking and gutting, at least that’s a cost they won’t have to pay contractors for. When you’ve lost everything, everything helps.”

In Jamestown, a Southern Baptist Disaster Relief team has brought volunteers, heavy equipment and determination to a town leveled by water and mudslides. On a recent Monday morning, it was difficult to find a resident in the town of about 200. With no water service, most were at jobs or living elsewhere in the interim. The streets buzzed with activity by Texans operating dump trucks, front-end loaders and hand-held shovels.

“You won’t find anybody in Jamestown complaining about a lack of help,” said town Trustee Bruce Boeke, who has a retail job in Boulder. “People have stepped up.”

The Baptists from Texas moved 6 to 8 feet of mud and debris from his yard, saving him perhaps $10,000, Boeke said.

Victims say the compassion is as good as the cash.

“We lost time and money because of the flood, but we gained something, too,” said Charles Schrader, who said he would spend half the value of the weekend hillside home to restore the structure and rebuild his road. “We saw that — from the volunteer firemen to soldiers — there are people who have your back in this world. That’s worth a lot, too.”

Loans, charity and faith

For many, the road to recovery will be a string of loan payments for years to come.

The Small Business Administration makes loans up to $200,000 to homeowners and up to $40,000 to renters, said spokesman Garth McDonald.

As of Thursday, 1,337 homeowners and 172 businesses had borrowed $61.6 million at an interest rate of 1.94 percent.

The agency helps applicants set up a repayment schedule they can afford, McDonald said.

FEMA spokesman Randy Welch said that while the agency can’t pony up enough to replace people’s homes, the help doesn’t end with free money.

FEMA finds charities and other government agencies that might help cover the gaps in needs that disaster money can’t, but for many, like Boeke, the coming months will include mortgage payments as well as paying rent. FEMA money for temporary housing expires on Nov. 17.

“It’ll be spring at the earliest,” the Jamestown trustee said of his move home from a rental, once he and his wife move out of his in-laws’ home in the next few weeks. “But more than likely it’ll be summer.”

Terry Marks, 26, of Evans lost a 35-year-old mobile home that used to be her grandparents’, and nearly all of the possessions she, her husband and three kids had accumulated. Her secondhand things had little monetary worth, so the FEMA check amounted to less than $3,000, she said.

“It’s hard to start over on that,” she said in a phone call from her parents’ home in North Platte, Neb . “We believe in God, though, and we hope he’ll provide. I don’t know if that’s going to be in Colorado, though.”

Joey Bunch: 303-954-1174, jbunch@denverpost.com or twitter.com/joeybunch