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The ranks of Florida’s hurricane homeless continue to swell by as many as 100 people per day, three months after the first of four storms struck the state, a Federal Emergency Management Agency official in Orlando said Thursday.

Thousands of hurricane victims still are thought to be living in damaged homes, with friends and family, on porches, in cars and even in sheds and barns, said Brad Gair, FEMA deputy federal coordinating officer in Orlando.

“It is the largest operation of this type that we’ve done, so we are building a system on the go to handle it,” said Gair.

Nearly 3,100 hurricane victims were on a FEMA waiting list for temporary housing assistance Thursday. But officials said they’ve had to scramble to accommodate growing numbers of people chased from their storm-damaged dwellings by mold and other previously undetected problems, Gair said.

Some of those are ordered to vacate by county inspectors who are going door to door “red tagging” dwellings where people have been living despite dangerous conditions, he added.

“We have the Army Corps of Engineers going around, and they are finding a couple hundred a day living in red-tagged dwellings, so we are doing everything we can to help them, even putting travel trailers on their lots for them,” said Gair.

Meanwhile, governmental red tape and logistical problems have slowed efforts to put storm victims in temporary housing. In devastated Punta Gorda, the relief agency spent $10 million to build a 66-acre development housing mobile homes.

It opened two weeks ago, but as of Thursday fewer than 100 of the 350 three-bedroom homes have been occupied.

Gretchen Ward-Martin and her six children are among the lucky few. After Hurricane Charley brought down the roof on their rented house in Charlotte County, their family moved from place to place and problem to problem for nearly three months.

The 31-year-old single mother lost her fast food restaurant job and broke her collarbone after the storms. She had to send some children to relatives while shifting between shelters and friends’ homes with her family’s two carloads of possessions.

But last week, the family moved into a rent-free home in the state’s first and largest disaster housing neighborhood in Punta Gorda.

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“I felt a big relief when we walked in here to have our own private space,” she said.

A group of the first settlers have already circulated a petition asking for a playground because there is little for children to do.

“It’s really kind of a stark environment,” conceded Marvin Davis, a FEMA spokesman at the site, “but for many people it’s like the Garden of Eden.”

Smaller FEMA mobile-home communities are under construction in Arcadia, Wachula, on the shore of Lake Okeechobee and near Pensacola in the Panhandle, officials said.

Wes Smith can be reached at [email protected] or 407-420-5672.