Apps fight fraud in Sandy’s wake
Systems track debris removal to prevent inflated bills during massive cleanup
NEW YORK — A devastating storm like Sandy can bring out the crooks, and not just looters and burglars.
Officials dealing with the destruction in the Northeast said one of their biggest headaches is debris-removal fraud committed by contractors who inflate their share of the millions in cleanup funds doled out by federal agencies.
But new digital technologies created by private companies and municipalities in the wake of Hurricanes Katrina and Irene are making it easier to stop firms from overcharging by claiming they have trucked away more wreckage than they have.
The new software combats fraud and streamlines the task of documenting every last broken tree or bin of debris to prove to Federal Emergency Management Agency auditors that the money was properly spent.
Ray Iovino learned his lesson after 2011’s Hurricane Irene, which caused nearly $16 billion in damage across eight Northeastern states.
As assistant director of the bureau of equipment and inventory for Long Island’s Nassau County, Iovino remembers the messy months of paperwork that consumed his office after Irene felled nearly 2,500 trees in his area.
“The first thing they asked for were the pictures of every tree that went down in the storm,” Iovino said, referring to FEMA. County officials, unfamiliar with federal regulations, had simply written down the locations of the trees, which wasn’t good enough.
“FEMA said they’d have to go out and look at every single location,” Iovino said. “It was a nightmare.”
FEMA also “wanted to know which trucks trucked what debris where and when and how,” he said.
As superstorm Sandy raced up the Eastern Seaboard in late October, Iovino began researching a more efficient system to document the massive damage he expected and found DebrisTech LLC, a Mississippi debris-removal company whose chief executive, Brooks Wallace, was a victim of fraud after Katrina devastated the Gulf Coast region in 2005.
Wallace, an engineer, began thinking about how to avoid becoming a victim again. He spent $60,000 developing custom software to track debris trucks digitally with bar code scanners, digital photos and global positioning systems, rather than the standard paper ticketing system. The data would then be wirelessly uploaded to a central database.
“It’s amazing what a difference this software has made,” Iovino said. “Now when anything is picked up on Nassau County property, we know the size of the truck, the percentage the truck is full; we’ve got a picture of the debris in the truck, which transfer site it went to and where it is right now.
“When FEMA comes back this time, I’m going to hand them a CD with every imaginable piece of documentation on it.”
Industry experts expect technology like DebrisTech’s to have a profound effect on cleanup.
“I’ve been in debris-removal projects all over the country — Florida, California, Texas, Virginia, huge hurricanes, wildfires, floods,” said Russ Towndrow, a former Mississippi Emergency Management Agency official who has used the DebrisTech software. “This real-time data is a game-changer.”
Debris-removal fraud is widespread after major natural disasters, according to federal and state law enforcement officials.
“You can count on it every time,” said Kathleen Wylie, deputy director of the Justice Department’s National Center for Disaster Fraud. “It’s one of the first things we look for.”
Dishonest contractors will “do just about anything you could imagine — they’ll put water in trucks to weigh them down, they’ll put blocks underneath the debris to make the trucks look full. Or the guy at the gate will give a driver a new ticket for driving through with the same load.”
Digital debris-removal technology is also being tested by New York City. Programmers working with the city’s Parks Department recently completed workon software to replace an arduous and time-consuming paper ticketing system, said Jeremy Barrick, the Parks Department’s deputy chief of forestry.
“We were using paper ticketing after Irene, and we sat down afterward to talk about how we could track debris removal more effi- ciently,” Barrick said.
It led to the development of proprietary software known among city officials as “Storm Mobile.”
The software interfaces with the city’s nonemergency 311 call center, which residents can use to report downed trees.
“Every time the city logs a service request for a downed tree removal, our inspectors can see it in virtually real time,” Barrick said.