Just days ago the offices of HiRise Engineering were raided by the New York attorney general's office, which is conducting a criminal investigation into HiRise as well as the insurance companies that hired them. But not peer review when I send my final report and it's changed without my knowledge. Insurance companies have argued the reason the engineering reports were changed was to allow for a peer review process - a standard practice in the insurance industry.Īndrew Braum: Peer review to me would be amongst my peers of an equal-licensing or education level and review a report and discuss it.
And they wanted to hurry up and have, they called me Braum, "Braum, get Braum to sign off on this quick." So if Braum wasn't thinking or if Braum didn't care, he would just sign his name 200-something times, and they were off the hook. He showed us the original report he'd written about the damage to John and Gail Mero's house.Īndrew Braum: They figured out that they altered all those reports. I didn't do this.īraum told us not only were changes made to his engineering reports, but he was asked to cover it up. I wanted to tell them that this is not me. This is Andrew Braum, the engineer who could no longer stay silent.Īndrew Braum: I wanted to call them from day one. And from what I understand, the insurance company changed it, changed his words, without him knowing. The structural damage is caused by the flood. John Mero: The engineer sent his report in to the insurance company saying that the house was damaged due to flood. It was two years later that the Meros felt a second wave hit them, when the engineer who assessed their home after the storm called them out of the blue.
WRIGHT FLOOD INSURANCE FULL
John Mero: I was like how can you tell me that you're not gonna cover this, that I'm not gonna get the full amount of my insurance? I says, "You got my payments every month." Said, "It's time for you to pay and here's what you're gonna tell me?" Their insurance company paid them just $80,000 and now they're buried in debt after rebuilding their home. The Mero's house had to be torn down after the storm. The photo Kaible took was solid proof for many other Sandy victims who were struggling with similar situations. What am I gonna do?īob Kaible's house was torn down after he sold it for a loss and he believes it was because of a falsified engineering report. I've had estimates of $300-350,000 to rebuild the house. The Kaible's insurance company, Wright Flood, the largest provider of flood insurance in the country, paid him just $79,000 dollars of his $250,000 policy.īob Kaible: We had a mortgage on the house. meaning it existed before Hurricane Sandy. Quote "not structurally damaged." They said the damage was "long term". But this is the report the insurance company sent to Kaible when they denied his claim. It plainly said there was "structural damage" to the house. He says, "This is the report I wrote."īob Kaible got out his phone and took a picture of George's original report. Forensic.īob Kaible: I said, "George, how could you write a report like that?" He goes, "It's not my report." I said, "What do you mean it's not your report?" He says, "Wait here." He goes to the trunk of his car, goes, picks up the report and brings it into the house. Surprisingly, it was the same engineer, George Hernemar, who worked for a company called U.S. The insurance company agreed to send someone back out to the house. Making matters worse, appeals to the federal agency in charge of all of this, FEMA, went nowhere.īob Kaible: Just that this report is wrong. Thousands of claims have still not been resolved and there is evidence that many homeowners were victims of what appears to be wide-scale fraud where original damage reports were later changed to make it look like the damage wasn't as bad.
Many of them say they have been cheated out of their insurance claims. Now two and a half years later, Sandy victims have been hit by something else they didn't expect, the storm after the storm.
What they didn't expect was just how bad Sandy turned out to be: 117 deaths, and damage estimated at more than $60 billion, second only to Katrina. When Hurricane Sandy made its way towards the East Coast in the fall of 2012, residents knew it could be devastating. Oriana Zill de Granados and Michael Rey, producers. The following is a script from "The Storm after the Storm" which aired on March 1, 2015.
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