Walking up to the podium at the St. Tammany Parish Council meeting Thursday night, Delores Moore’s palms sweated, and her nerves were rattled. She was scared.

It was like approaching the guillotine, she said the day after.

Moore, who moved into a federally donated trailer on a plot of family land in Pearl River after her New Orleans apartment of 22 years was destroyed by Hurricane Katrina, pleaded with council members not to enforce a parish sponsored Aug. 29 deadline and make her leave her trailer. “It’s been a big nightmare,” she said Friday of her housing situation. “Here we are waiting on this deadline. I’m at a standstill. I don’t know what to do.”

Diagnosed last year with Sjogrens Syndrome, a potential debilitating disease that attacks the body’s moisture glands, Moore, at 62, has no where else to live. Her husband, Prentiss, 67, has a bevy of medical problems, including diabetes and glaucoma. Both are on Social Security. They can’t afford a new home.

“I’m suppose to fall down and die after a while, but I ignore it,” she said of her disease. “But I can’t stop now. We need a place to live.”

After moving to St. Tammany after a year in Arkansas, Moore contacted Volunteers of America, who promised, with the help of Red Cross, to buy her a $20,000 permanent trailer that would pass parish muster for a permanent permit, she said. She even picked one out with the organization’s help.

Last week she found out it was all for naught. Volunteers of America stopped calling, and when contacted they said there had been a mistake, Moore said, and she would not receive a permanent trailer. Now, with less than three weeks to go before the deadline, she and her husband are facing homelessness.

Moore is just one of roughly 1,300 parish residents still living in trailers donated by the Federal Emergency Management Agency. That number is down from roughly 11,000 months after the storm.

Parish President Kevin Davis in June launched the Aug. 29 deadline as an incentive to force people to renovate their homes and move out of trailers that many illegally sublet to others or use as a spare room or storage facility while living elsewhere. He assured the public, however, that FEMA would help those people find permanent housing, even funding hotel and food bills in the meantime.

“It’s been three years,” he said at the time. “It’s time to move forward.”

But Parish Council members on Thursday expressed concern for the deadline, saying some residents, like Moore, are caught between a rock and a hard place.

“We don’t want to dump people out of their trailers,” Council President Jerry Binder said. “We just want to move forward.”

Binder said he spoke with Davis, who is away on vacation, and said the three-term parish president promised some exceptions would apply.

“We’re not going to put anybody on the street,” he said.

Moore is not convinced.

After being promised the trailer, she spent her FEMA recovery money on upgrading the plot of land off Sun Moore Road, named after her kin, on Louisiana Highway 11 in Pearl River. She landscaped and brought in truckloads of $300 dirt fill anticipating her new trailer’s arrival, a move that zapped her pocketbook. And with the dead promise from Volunteers of America, she’s not sure whom to trust.

“We’re just in a fix,” she said Friday. “The system is just not for the people anymore.”

Bill Oiler, the parish government’s chief administrative officer, tried to offer assurances Thursday night.

FEMA, he said, can move about 75 trailers per week out of St. Tammany Parish. And with about 1,300 left parishwide, the process would take “four to five months if FEMA is running full tilt,” meaning there is time to find other housing.

“FEMA is not going to remove them overnight,” he said.

Parish Councilman Ken Burkhalter representing the Slidell area, called for a possible extension, the ninth since Davis authorized an executive order in October 2005 that allows residents to live in FEMA trailers despite violations of parish zoning rules. No motion was made or approved for such an extension.

But Burkhalter rallied, saying many people in his district are working “night and day” to fix their houses and meet the deadline, and many still won’t meet it.

He questioned FEMA’s ability to help people like Moore find permanent and affordable housing in St. Tammany, where rent and energy costs have skyrocketed.

On Thursday, he called for a meeting with the Housing Urban Development Foundation and FEMA to hash out areas where trailer residents can move. At a prior meeting with those officials, he said no solutions were given.

Officials at the meeting basically said “we will move you out on a one-way ticket,” Burkhalter told the council Thursday. “How can we expect FEMA in 90 days to move these people?”

Parish Councilman Steve Stefancik, also representing the Slidell area, disagreed. The extension pushes people to move faster to rebuild, he said.

“We need to move forward, but we’re willing to work with exceptions,” he said.

For now, Moore can do nothing but pray.

During the 22 years in her apartment off Claiborne Avenue, she cooked and cared for its mostly elderly residents. She even helped the illiterate landlord collect rent, she said.

“I just turned my life over to (the tenants) and then all of a sudden Katrina came and now we’re in that situation where we need help,” she said. “We’re just trying to live.”