Julie Cook and her 5-year-old nephew, Christopher Eisen, amid the rubble of their Breezy Point home. Jennifer Maloney/The Wall Street Journal

The three sisters keep coming back to the charred remains of their house.

Hurricane Sandy: As It Happened

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Hurricane Sandy: As it Happened

A toaster is visible. A broken coffee mug. A wire basket of blackened cutlery, fused together.

"This is so sickening," said Ellie Cook, 25 years old, who lived at 11 Irving Walk with her sisters, Clair and Julie, their brother, Billy, their parents, Dennis and Patricia, and Clair's two children, ages 5 and 10 months.

A week ago, their home was among more than 100 in Breezy Point, at the end of Rockaway Peninsula in Queens, that were burned to the ground as firefighters, hamstrung by Sandy, stood helpless in choppy, chest-high water.

Now, like tens of thousands of newly homeless families across the Greater New York region, the Cooks are turning their attention to what comes next. They need to find housing, enroll Clair's 5-year-old son in a new school and navigate red tape as they file insurance and Federal Emergency Management Agency claims.

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They are among the 86,000 New York City-area households that FEMA said have already registered for federal disaster assistance, at a cost of $97 million. Without homes, many of these families are staying in hotels or bunking with family members, looking ahead to an uncertain future.

The Cooks, who rented a summer home in Breezy Point before moving there permanently 13 years ago, have spread out among friends and relatives until they sort out their lives and figure out how to rebuild.

"Living out of a bag, back and forth, one house to the other," Julie Cook said, describing her day-to-day life now.

The family was a stalwart of the Breezy Point neighborhood, a tightknit enclave that is home to many firefighters and police officers and is known for a self-sufficient sensibility.

Dennis Cook, 61, the family patriarch, is a retired police officer for the U.S. Postal Service. Like many Breezy Point families, the Cooks decided to ride out Sandy last Monday despite an evacuation order.

All except for Ellie were home when it struck. They said they knew they could handle the water. What they didn't expect was fire.

"The fire was about five blocks away," said Julie Cook, 35 years old. "The water was already receding."

A neighbor who works for the New York City Fire Department waded over to the Cooks' house and made frantic calls to authorities, as more and more houses went up in flames. But with firehouses and trucks flooded, there was little the local firefighters could do.

As the fire got closer and the water receded enough to walk to safety, the Cooks left their house, wading through knee-deep water to a relative's house.

The next day, the Cooks split up—the beginning of what could be months of nomadic living.

Billy Cook went to a friend's apartment in Bay Ridge. Dennis and Patricia Cook headed to a friend's home in Marine Park, Brooklyn. Clair, her two children and her sisters headed to a different relative's home, also in Marine Park.

That brought to eight the total number of people sleeping in her cousin's home, which consists of two adjacent two-bedroom apartments.

"We would like to find a more permanent place, start getting organized in some way," said Clair Cook, 28. Looking at her 5-year-old son, Christopher Eisen, she said, "I have to get him back in school."

His school, Public School 114, in nearby Belle Harbor, likely won't open for some time. The city is making accommodations for students of damaged schools to go back to class in other locations. Clair said she would like to find an apartment to rent in Marine Park and enroll Christopher in a school nearby. Clair, who works for the city Department of Education as a paraprofessional, said she wasn't yet ready to return to work.

Clair and her sisters said their parents have filed a claim with their homeowners' insurance company and have registered online with FEMA.

They plan to rebuild the house on Breezy Point, though they say they know it could take years.

On Sunday, the family spent much of the day just trying to get gasoline, heading to a station at 1 a.m. to fuel up one car. To fuel another, they siphoned gas from their father's disabled car in Breezy Point. And the siblings returned to the house to check the water level of the basement. Their hope is that the water will recede enough that they can recover some belongings that were shielded from the fire by the water.

That was their goal last Friday, when Clair, her sisters and her son Christopher headed back to the remains of their house. The previous day, they had managed to retrieve their mother's ceramic nativity set, wrapped in wet paper.

Julie Cook stood by the home's foundations and peered into the pile, holding Christopher on her hip.

"Do you see anything?" she said.

"My toys!" Christopher said.

"No, buddy, your toys are all gone," she said. "We'll get you new ones."