Laura Hogshead did not lose her job as the head of ReBuild NC on Wednesday, as many hurricane survivors had hoped. Instead, several state lawmakers on a government oversight committee used the hearing as another opportunity to publicly berate Hogshead for the many deficiencies of the hurricane recovery program. An abysmal number of home completions and a lack of accountability. A pattern of deception and a culture of secrecy.
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ReBuild NC
ReBuild NC
The WRAL documentary team investigates what happened to these hurricane victims in its latest documentary Aftermath: North Carolina Hurricane Victims Left Behind. The new documentary premieres on WRAL-TV on Tuesday, December 13, at 7:30 p.m.
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Ms. Johnson’s toilet has sat, unconnected to any plumbing, in the middle of her master bathroom for more than a year. Mold is blooming in her master bedroom closet, caused by a leaking shower. The water pressure is low, and her floors are uneven. Her contractor, Persons Services has not fixed the issues since 2021, Johnson said. And the NC Office of Recovery and Resiliency, also known as ReBuild NC, has failed to hold Persons accountable.
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A plume of polluted groundwater is spreading in Mecklenburg County, where Colonial Pipeline is responsible for the largest gasoline spill in the U.S. since the early 1990s. On Aug. 14, 2020, two teenage boys found gasoline bubbling from the ground at the Oehler Nature Preserve, in Huntersville. The company now estimates 2 million gallons leaked from a section of pipeline that had broken roughly a month before.
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A new federal Inspector General's report found that ReBuild NC couldn't provide "reasonable assurance" that $2.5 million in Hurricane Matthew disaster relief funds had been "properly spent," according to an audit dated Sept. 16 and published by the US Department of Housing and Urban Development. If the state can't provide documentation for those expenditures, it must repay those funds to HUD.
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They arrived with folded papers pulled from their pockets. Some came carrying folders that brimmed with documents neatly arranged in binder clips. Others arrived empty-handed, but hoped to leave with answers. With scores more watching in person and online, survivors of hurricanes Matthew and Florence spoke before a state government oversight committee Wednesday about the injustices they have endured – a direct result of the bungled disaster relief program run by the NC Office of Recovery and Resiliency, also known as ReBuild NC.
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Six years. That’s how long it will have been, come next month, since Hurricane Matthew raked and inundated eastern North Carolina with high winds and catastrophic rainfall. The storm arrived on October 8, 2016, and left within a day, but the trail of destruction that resulted was huge.
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ReBuild NC also revises -- upward -- expenditures on motels, other temporary housing for hurricane survivors 508 years or 185,522 days: That’s the total amount of time spent displaced for the 1,774 households receiving temporary relocation assistance from ReBuild NC’s homeowner disaster relief program ReBuild NC, whose formal name is the NC Office of Recovery and Resiliency, sent the information to Policy Watch, which requested the figures under public records law.
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ReBuild NC has spent $10.64 million on motels, moving and storage unit expenses in three years for displaced Hurricane Matthew survivors, as construction and administrative delays have kept people from returning to their homes. The figures were included in Temporary Relocation Assistance (TRA) data provided by ReBuild NC, also known as the NC Office of Recovery and Resiliency.
...Displaced homeowners also finding their belongings damaged in mobile storage units; state paid for them but says it's not responsible The NC Office of Recovery and Resiliency could not produce records to Policy Watch of how much money it has spent in the last five years on motels and storage units for people displaced by Hurricane Matthew, according to a spokesperson’s email. However, based on figures for just six families, the amount likely runs into the millions of dollars.
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