Shoddy workmanship plague recovery efforts on islands
ST. THOMAS, US Virgin Islands: After back-to-back Category 5 hurricanes blew through here in fall 2017, Russell Bryan joined thousands of Americans who rushed to “chase dreams and promises” of big wages from the federal reconstruction effort.
A contracting firm said his crew would split about US$ 50,000 for their work on 89 properties. So Bryan arrived with 10 friends and relatives last summer to repair blown-in doors and busted window frames and install FEMA-funded roofs, at times working up to 12 hours a day.
But the money never arrived, and Bryan could barely afford the ice water he needed to work under the blazing Caribbean sun. The 27-year- old had to call his mother and plead for a plane ticket home.
“I felt stranded,” Bryan said after he climbed down from the roof on his final day on the job earlier this month. “If I stayed here, as a guy looking for his money, it’s nothing but trouble.”
Frustration has consumed the Virgin Islands amid a wave of complaints about unpaid bills, broken promises and shoddy work in the aftermath of Hurricanes Irma and Maria. In one case, the tension culminated in an armed standoff over allegations of unpaid contractors.
The discord has cast light on how the Federal Emergency Management Agency, the Virgin Islands government and two private multibillion- dollar engineering companies are managing the recovery, and the extent to which the financial windfall is filtering down to the sweaty workers doing much of the manual labour.
“It just seems to be a very sketchy business model and based on business practices that are questionable,” said Sen. Alicia Barnes, a member of the territorial legislature. “It seems to be a total breakdown in bureaucratic processes where there is no appropriate oversight.”
A year and a half after Irma hit, the beaches have been cleaned and cruise ships again crowd area ports. Most residents say the overall pace of the recovery has been quicker than with past storms.
Like Puerto Ricans, the 103,000 residents of the Virgin Islands are American citizens, though they cannot vote in the presidential election and have no voting representation in Congress.
Last summer, to try to expedite the recovery on the Virgin Islands, FEMA authorised a first- of-its-kind expansion of its Sheltering and Temporary Essential Power ( STEP) programme, created after Hurricane Sandy struck the US East Coast in 2012, to make minor repairs on houses so residents could avoid costly relocations to hotels, temporary trailers and new rental units.
FEMA allowed the Virgin Islands to exceed the typical US$ 25,000 cap on repairs on a
I felt stranded. If I stayed here, as a guy looking for his money, it’s nothing but trouble.
case-by- case basis.
In February, three major subcontractors working under AECOM said they and other firms are collectively owed more than US$ 60 million for work performed, putting some firms at risk of insolvency or bankruptcy.
In a statement to The Washington Post, AECOM did not address whether its subcontractors have been paid in a timely manner, but said, “We are committed to doing everything we can in partnership with the Virgin Islands Territory and FEMA to provide the timely payment of services to subcontractors, including the substantial investment of our capital and resources to expedite payments in advance of the release of programme funds.”
Daryl Griffith, executive director of the Virgin Islands Housing Finance Authority, said the territory has paid out nearly all of the US$ 187 million in federal funds received for the STEP program. FEMA has promised another US$ 86 million, he said, for a total of $ 273 million.
But Michael Byrne, FEMA’s federal coordinator for the Puerto Rican and Virgin Islands recoveries, said the agency has only allocated US$ 223 million so far. Either way, it appears the federal allocation is likely to fall far short of the nearly half-billion dollars Griffith says the program will cost when all invoices are collected.
Many local workers worry the money will never make it to their pockets anyway.
Nathaniel Phillips, a 35-yearold native of St. Thomas, one of the territory’s three islands, said he assembled seven crews
Russell Bryan, American who is doing repair work on the islands
in November for roofing work for an Aptim subcontractor, based on a promise that each man would earn between US$ 150 and US$ 500 ( RM630 and RM2,100) a day.
But after about a month of unpaid work, with Christmas approaching, the workers turned their fury on Phillips.
“They would say, ‘I am going to get my gun and I’m coming for my money,’ “Phillips said. “I literally never thought about having a gun - I am a boxer. But after my life and my family’s life was threatened, I went to buy a gun.”
Phillips and his father cobbled together about US$ 15,000 to hand out to the workers, though the subcontractor still had not paid him, he said, and he could not afford to buy a Christmas gift for his 12-year- old daughter. He and the rest of the workers finally walked off the job on Jan 2, alleging they were owed a combined US$ 150,000 ( RM630,000).
The subcontractor, Texasbased Allco Construction, did not return calls seeking comment.
After Phillips and the other workers held a protest on St. Thomas to draw attention to their plight, Allco arranged to pay some of them. Phillips wasn’t one of them.
Dorf, from Aptim, said the company “does not have direct line- of- sight into second-tier subcontractor payments” but allows them “to voice their concerns.” The responsibility for paying subcontractors ultimately rests with the company that hired them, said Brad Gair, a consultant for Witt O’Brien’s, which is advising the territory on its recovery efforts.
The layers of subcontractors working on the reconstruction is a “lesson learned” for the territorial government, Griffith said.
“Whether they pay or not on time, we don’t have visibility on that,” he said. “And all of these stories we hear are either totally heart-wrenching or incredibly infuriating.”
Licensed construction contractor Scott Johnson said the dispute over funding is indicative of broader management shortfalls. A veteran of more than a dozen hurricane-recovery projects, Johnson was lured to St. Croix shortly after Christmas by a subcontracting firm under AECOM that promised him he could make more than US$ 1,000 a week. He worked on four houses - all projects that had previously been started by other contractors who either walked off the job due to non-payment or were yanked from the job because of poor craftsmanship.
At one job, he said, a homeowner cried on his shoulder because a previous contractor had done more damage to her home than the hurricanes did.
He fled back to Florida in early February, unable to finish even one roof because of chronic material shortages and poor supervision, he said.
“I have never in my life seen anything more mismanaged than this contract,” said Johnson, 46. “The people there deserve better. They should be treated on a level of eight to 10, but instead are being treated on a level of 1 to 1½.”
Gair said the quality of the work is inspected separately by the general contractor, Witt O’Brien’s, FEMA and the Virgin Islands Department of Planning and Natural Resources, a process that can take months and lead to delayed checks.
Vernon Eddy, 84, is one of the Virgin Islands residents who believes the process has failed him. Hurricane Irma left a few small holes in the ceiling of his living room and bathroom in his St. Thomas home. As contractors replaced his roof, Eddy said, the rain that arrives here almost daily opened up more than a dozen new holes in his ceiling.
He begged them to return to repair the damage.
“They just say they are not coming back, and they are finished with me,” he said.
The problem was particularly urgent for Eddy. His 88-yearold wife was recovering from a stroke in Nashville, Tennessee, and he didn’t want to bring her home until the house was in top shape.
She died earlier this month as Eddy waited.
Sarah Mickelson, a senior policy director at the National Low-Income Housing Coalition, said FEMA’s STEP program is an example of how the federal government’s outsourcing of disaster-recovery operations can short- change residents.
That states and localities are only reimbursed for approved costs after work is completed - meaning those governments have to front sometimes hundreds of millions of dollars - has proven especially problematic for the Virgin Islands, where the government was struggling to pay bills even before the storm.
The territory has accumulated about US$ 1.7 billion in debt and has just seven to 10 days of cash on hand. Moody’s Investors Service, which rates the territory’s credit worthiness, has assigned it the third-lowest of 21 ratings, one above Puerto Rico, which declared a form of bankruptcy in 2017.
Faith in the system is deteriorating. The US battorney’s office for the Virgin Islands has launched at least one investigation.
In February, a federal grand jury indicted four individuals alleged to have submitted fraudulent invoices for housing allowances, including for some workers who never performed work on the island.
Meanwhile, tensions are escalating among those who have done the work and are struggling to get paid on time.
David Burgess, a local contractor, believes many of the large contracting firms working on the STEP program are engaged in what he called “sub busting.”
He said the large firms are giving local workers incomplete blueprints or specifications for how a roof should be constructed under FEMA guidelines. Then, just as a project is about to be completed, the firms fire the workers to avoid paying them.
“It’s a way of keeping everything top-heavy so the money never reaches the ground,” said Burgess, 62, who owns J& K Roofing, which the Virgin Islands Daily News has voted the “best roofer” on St. Thomas for the past two years. “They set you up to fail, and then after you complete 60 or 70 per cent of the job, they come in and say, ‘You don’t get paid.’ “— Washington Post.