Questions, Delays Strain Quake-Frayed Nerves : Rebuilding: Consumers are growing frustrated by the inability to get quick answers from insurance companies, lenders and federal agencies.

Like thousands of others whose lives were disrupted by the big quake, David L. Blender isn’t sure where the money will come from to rebuild his badly damaged home in Chatsworth.

What’s unusual in Blender’s case is that he’s a tax attorney, highly experienced in analyzing a contract’s fine print. But when it comes to the earthquake coverage on his two-story house, he’s uncertain about the exact obligation of his insurer, 20th Century Insurance Co., based in Woodland Hills.

Blender’s house on Jumilla Avenue was hit so hard that an engineer he hired says the structure should be stripped to the studs and rebuilt with shearing walls instead of dry walls, which split badly in the Northridge earthquake.

“Normally, I read everything in a contract,” Blender says. “That’s my job. But to tell you the truth, I’m not sure whether 20th Century has to help rebuild the house properly in light of what we now know. If we went back to dry wall, I’d be fearful for my family’s safety.”

In addition to an engineer, Blender has hired an architect and a contractor. He’s also been visited by a 20th Century claims adjuster, who told him he’d be hearing from the company soon. Meanwhile, Blender, his wife and their two children are living in a rented trailer nearby.

“Right now, I’m not mad at anybody. But if I don’t hear from 20th Century in another week, my patience will be getting short,” he said.

More than two weeks after the disaster, people are still confused about how to raise the money to rebuild their homes and their lives. Many are just angry--at insurers, the federal government, lending institutions, even, to an extent, at fellow victims who are receiving emergency assistance.

As Bernie Sherman, a career counselor at North Hollywood High School, drives past the parks where earthquake victims are being fed and sheltered in tent cities, he thinks about the extensive damage inflicted on his house in Northridge.

“I don’t object to the free food and the tents and all the rest,” he said. “But then I think, ‘Hey, I’m the giant middle class. My block wall is down. I’ve got cracks everywhere. The dishes and china are gone. What about me?’ ”

His earthquake policy with 20th Century has several deductibles: $22,000 on the structure of his house, $15,000 for damage of personal property, and another deductible for other structures on his property. There are so many earthquake deductibility clauses that “I question whether I’ll get a penny” from the insurance company, Sherman said.

“I know my income is too high for me to get a FEMA loan, so I decided to call my mortgage holder. Maybe they’d give me some kind of moratorium on my payments,” he said.

A customer service representative at Fleet Mortgage Corp. in Milwaukee assured Sherman that the firm would understand and that there’d be no penalty charge if he was late with his mortgage payments.

“But when I asked her to put it in writing, she turned me over to somebody who filled in the details,” Sherman said. “They were willing to give me a moratorium until June 1. But after that, I’d have to make either a payment and a half, or a double payment every month until I was caught up. They weren’t sure which it would be.”

In the mobile home where Carol and Tony De Lill lived in Santa Clarita, the walls were twisted out of shape, the hardwood parquet flooring was ruined by water, and, among other valuables, the couple lost a prized set of Austrian leaded crystal figurines.

An adjuster from Foremost Insurance Co., a Grand Rapids, Mich., firm that specializes in mobile home coverage, estimated the total loss at $14,000, Carol De Lill said.

“That’s ridiculous, far less than it will cost to get the place back in shape,” she declared. “The man said it would cost only $3,200 to replace our ruined siding--exactly what I told him we paid to install it six or eight years ago.” The De Lills have consulted an attorney.

At the Woodland Hills home of Jan and Paul Holtzman, the quake caused ceilings to collapse, badly damaged the chimney and blew out windows as well as starting a mattress fire. “A lamp fell on the mattress and somehow caught it on fire,” Jan Holtzman said. “We dragged the mattress out of the house and tossed it into the pool.”

That put out the fire, but the Holtzmans are still smoldering. They haven’t heard about an emergency federal loan they’ve applied for. And, even though they filed an earthquake insurance claim by telephone, they’ve had no word from their insurance agency, which they declined to identify.

“I haven’t left the house since the earthquake,” Jan Holtzman said. “I’m afraid I’ll miss a call from one of them.”

Dr. Ari Levy, a clinical psychologist, didn’t suffer a lot of damage at his home in North Hills, but he reported losing income because patients couldn’t get to his office nearby in Granada Hills.

When he called Bank of America to seek a moratorium on his home mortgage payments, he said he was told that he could skip his next three payments, but that he would have to make a quadruple payment in May.

“I couldn’t believe it,” he said. “I said, “And you call this a moratorium?’ Naturally, I didn’t accept their offer.”

A Bank of America spokesman, Adrian Rodriguez, explained: “This must have been a loan that we’d issued initially but later sold to a secondary lender. We still service many of those loans but must follow the secondary lender’s policies.”

Rodriguez said BofA is trying to be flexible with quake victims seeking moratoriums on loan payments. Each case is handled on its merits, he said. “There’s no set policy, but I can assure you we’re not insisting on four payments at once on our own loans.”

Not all quake victims are dissatisfied with the treatment they’ve received.

Chuck Goodman of Reseda went to an Allstate Insurance claims center in Woodland Hills and an adjuster handed him a $5,000 check “just on my say-so that our house was in bad shape and we needed to move into a hotel.”

A Foremost Insurance adjuster gave Teri Nelson $1,600 to help her move out of her damaged mobile home in Canyon Country. “He’s also allowing me $25 a day, even though I’m staying with my daughter,” she said.

A construction firm is supposed to visit Nelson’s home in a few days to arrange repairs. Like tax attorney Blender, however, Nelson is troubled about what lies ahead.

“Our unit was on jacks,” she said. “Two of the jacks came through the kitchen floor. They could have killed me. I wish the code could be changed so they’d have to build me an earthquake-proof foundation.”