Here are the documents: The state’s failure, after five years, to help Hurricane Matthew survivors

I was driving around rural Wilson County searching for a specific house, whose owner — a survivor of Hurricane Matthew — I had matched to property records. “No trespassing” read one sign. “Private property” read another. But a man was fixing his truck in the driveway, so I stopped, got out of the car, and ensuring that I stayed on the public road, asked if I could speak with him.

Sam Cockrell couldn’t have been nicer. He spent more than hour showing me around his property, his damaged home where his father once lived, his belongings crammed into two PODS. I learned he’s a fan of the Washington Football Team, likes motorcycles, and loves to fish.

He’s been living in a Comfort Inn for going on a year. He’s tired of it. He wants to be back in the shade of his pine trees. He wants to move into his new home, a 1,000-square foot Carson floor plan with a both a front and back porch that will keep him cool and dry.

In Craven County Herman Jones was tinkering in his workshop where he restores old radios. “Would you like to talk about your experience with Hurricane Matthew and your home?” I asked.

“Boy, would I,” Jones replied. And for the next 60 minutes he told me of his myriad frustrations with the contractor, Rescue Construction Solutions, and their subcontractors. He gave me a tour of his home, with its sticky back door and uneven kitchen floor. The ruined pile of concrete that had work crews had left open in the rain. The air vents that had been installed upside down.

These are real people, not just figures on a spreadsheet, not just “applicants.” They have been traumatized by Hurricane Matthew — and in some cases, Florence. And they’re still living motels, with relatives, in damage houses, in travel trailers, for months, even years.

How could this happen? All these people, likely thousands considering the number of households still displaced, without a permanent home five and a half years after Hurricane Matthew.

I needed to answer the questions: Who’s accountable? How is the system broken? Who has the power to fix it? What’s at stake? Who’s winning? Who’s losing?

The NC Office of Recovery and Resiliency is in charge of the homeowner recovery program for Hurricane Matthew disaster relief. And through sources and documents, I learned about a contractor, Rescue Construction Solutions.

It’s not the only contractor in the program, but it has the lion’s share of projects.

A month after trips to courthouses, database and property records searches, dozens and dozens of phone calls and emails, plus logging 1,000 miles on my Prius, I finally could write the first story, published yesterday. Simply put, it’s about how NCORR’s lack of oversight, its management of the disaster relief program and the plodding pace of Rescue Construction Solutions in particular, is holding up progress.

At stake are the happiness and peace of people like Sam and Herman and Sheri and Bill and Denisa and Judy and James and Gloria and Patricia, and all those people — not just “applicants” — who just want to go home.

Here are the public records requests. I filed the first one on April 12, and told NCORR I could accept the documents on a rolling basis. That means they could send the records as soon as they got them, rather than wait for all the documents to come in.

I have received very few documents from NCORR not even from requests filed nearly a month ago. I filed another request on May 9 with the Division of Emergency Management and the Department of Commerce asking for documents related to background checks for contractors; these two agencies were in charge of the program in 2018 when contractors were prequalified.

On Tuesday, May 2, I interviewed NCORR Chief Operating Officer Laura Hogshead on Zoom. With her permission, the interview was recorded.

Policy Watch immediately shared the audio and video with NCORR. On Thursday, May 4, NCORR requested a followup interview, which occurred on Monday, May 9. Again, the interview was recorded.

Hogshead also corresponded with me several times by email over the weekend of May 7-8.

I emailed Sheila Brewington, president of Rescue Construction Solutions, twice. She didn’t reply, but a crisis communications firm representing Rescue called me, then issued a statement — again not answering the questions.

These are some of the documents I cobbled together to report the story:

• Bid worksheets
• A Wake County civil court case against Rescue that started in 2017, and should have been disclosed by the company when it applied to be prequalified, and again when it bid on projects
• A federal court case involving work at Fort Bragg. In that litigation, Rescue sued the bonding company for the general contractor over a pay dispute. The general contractor had fired Rescue for allegedly botching a roofing job, and didn’t want to pay. The court did force the contractor to pay Rescue. However, on page 4 of the document, there is a reference to Rescue’s “unworkmanlike and untimely performance.”
• The changes in scorecard measurements in the summer of 2021
• Rescue’s pre-qualification application, dated June 2018
• NCORR’s invitation to bid on the modular project dated July 16, 2021

Here are spreadsheets. All personal information has been removed.

Status of May projects.

All 1,486 complaints lodged against all contractors, not just Rescue. Rescue had 585 complaints, although that could be expected since the company had so many projects. Other companies with more than 100 complaints: Excel Contractors, 297; Persons Service 222 and Thompson Construction 172.

This story has been updated with May data. Homeowners’ names, addresses and phone numbers have been redacted.