"Hi. I'm with FEMA. I have Small Business Administration, city, county and state with me," said a FEMA inspector. "We're collecting preliminary damage assessments from the flooding that happened a couple of weekends ago. Are you getting any rain water in your basement? Was there any damage?"

The Federal Emergency Management Agency is going door-to-door in southeast Wisconsin looking to understand the magnitude of damage caused by recent record flooding.

"Our teams will go wherever the state and the county requests that we go. We will see as much damage as they ask us to see," FEMA spokesperson Nicole Wilson said. "We have four teams in Milwaukee county, one in Waukesha County and one in Washington County."

Accompanied by local officials, their objective is to ask questions and collect information for a Preliminary Damage Assessment.

"We're serving as their escorts around the community because we have familiarity with the landscape," said Cassandra Libal, director of the Milwaukee County Office of Emergency Management. "So that's our role today, but prior to this we've been working to collaborate all or coordinate all the information gathering from 211 reports, so that we can give that picture to the FEMA representatives of the damage that we've experienced in the community."

The 211 social services helpline has been flooded with thousands of daily calls from residents reporting their losses. Meanwhile, Milwaukee County's latest estimates on damage to public infrastructure have reached at least $34 million dollars – a figure that doesn't include individual property losses.

"Large piles of garbage, where people are losing their belongings, their memories, things along those lines, and just impacting on their day-to-day life," Libal noted. "We've seen people having to come into our shelters because they're unable to stay in their current locations, families with young children."

"Flooded basements, foundational damage, a lot of people with lost possessions and couches and furniture and things like that — so a lot of folks here are hurting," said Greg Engle, administrator of Wisconsin Emergency Management.

People like Tyrone Roberts, a resident of Milwaukee.

'We never had this much trash on our block," he said, "from neighbors bringing out their stuff from getting destroyed from the flood to the garbage can getting overflowed with garbage now the garbage man don't want even come down the street."

And help can't come soon enough.

"I'm disabled, I need help. And they said, 'Well, it's going to take time, It's going to take time,'" Roberts said."So, we just got to deal with it, and do the most as we can as a community."

In the short-term, officials recommend calling 211.

"211 can take that damage information, but they can also connect residents with services in their area that can help them," Engel said.

But large-scale aid is still a ways off.

'We're really just trying to get a snapshot," Libal explained. "We just need to get a representative sample of what has happened across the county."

Wilson explained the process going forward.

"This is the first step in the process toward getting a major disaster declaration. So here we are in the beginning phase here," she said.

Next, Wisconsin Gov. Tony Evers will need to use the information gathered to make a formal request to FEMA.

"FEMA will make the recommendation to the president — the president has the final say on whether a disaster declaration will be issued," Wilson said.

When that could happen is still unknown.