HILO, Hawai'i — Mental health outreach workers who went to work as early as mid-November to help traumatized victims of last year's Big Island earthquakes still haven't been paid by the state, and the workers say they are now suffering some financial trauma of their own.

Janet Curley, Hilo team leader on the project, said members of her team struggled through the holiday season without pay, and are frustrated that it has taken the state Department of Health so long to cut them checks.

In Curley's case, she said she was told she can't be paid until February or later because her paperwork wasn't processed in time.

"It's bad. I've used my savings, and I don't have any additional resources at this point," she said. "We're trying very hard to pay the rent."

Michelle Hill, Department of Health deputy director for behavioral health administration, said she intervened last week to push out paychecks for the project, and said all but one of the three dozen workers involved will be paid Jan. 19.

The project was financed with a $283,000 grant to Department of Health from the Federal Emergency Management Agency to help respond to the Oct. 15 earthquakes, which caused an estimated $200 million damage to homes, schools, businesses and other structures.

The outreach workers said they traveled country roads for weeks, knocking on doors, interviewing earthquake victims, and linking up those who needed help with services.

Curley said she passed up opportunities to work as a per-diem nurse at Hilo Medical Center because she was committed to working full time on the earthquake project.

Suzi Bond, a community outreach worker on the project, said she joined the project because she wanted to help after the disaster, and she hoped to use the job to pay down some bills as she headed into the holidays.

"Instead of getting ahead, now all of my payments are late, and I'm looking like a deadbeat to everybody," she said. Bond said she had to borrow money from her mother to make a mortgage payment.

As for the Department of Health, Bond said the incident "should be horribly embarrassing to everyone who works there."

Hill said the department originally planned to have some of the contract hires working on the project paid on Dec. 20, but those employees' paperwork "crossed the desk of individuals right around the Christmas period, and I think the staffing may have been such that it didn't clear everyone's desk precisely when we would have preferred, so unfortunately that's where we take responsibility."

In other cases, Hill said, workers hired for the project for some reason had not completed the packet of paperwork the state requires for its contract hires in time to be paid earlier.

So far, Hill acknowledged, none of the outreach workers has been paid. The workers who were hired in November should have been paid first, and "those are the individuals that we probably owe the greatest apology to," she said.

Reach Kevin Dayton at kdayton@honoluluadvertiser.com.