In the space of a week, the reporters had drawn a disturbing picture of what had occurred in FEMA’s disaster recovery efforts in Miami-Dade County. But they still did not know how or why it had happened. Kestin reflects:

The first thing we know is they're handing out money to people that don’t deserve it. Why is that? What about this FEMA system is flawed that allows these claims to be approved, and what are the safeguards that FEMA has to make sure that a claim is valid?... We started educating ourselves.

On Monday, October 18, the reporters began another week of their FEMA investigation. They knew now, both from their reporting in the projects and from comments FEMA director Brown himself had made, that FEMA’s inspectors had approved fraudulent damage claims. But they needed more proof before they felt comfortable printing that. Though they held out little hope that FEMA’s public affairs office would provide much more information than Brown had, it seemed the logical place to start.

As they had expected, FEMA's media office refused to discuss the agency’s inspectors, beyond saying that they worked for privately contracted inspection companies whose names FEMA would not disclose. But the reporters were undeterred, and with the help of the paper’s librarians, they soon pinpointed the companies’ names, addresses, and phone numbers. There were two of them—Alltech Inc., a subsidiary of Parsons Brinckerhoff, and Parternship for Response and Recovery, both based in Virginia. The reporters even found some inspectors’ names, photos, and profiles on Parsons Brinckerhoff's website. When Kestin called the companies, however, they refused to comment on their activites, saying that as private corporations they were not subject to FOIA.

But Demma encouraged Kestin and O’Matz to try to work around official silence using publicly available documents. So the reporters turned to Google and the news database LexisNexis, entering the search terms “FEMA inspectors” and scouring the results for any clues that would lead them to sources. Over two weeks of searching, they compiled a list of names from news reports and inspectors’ weblogs. In the meantime, phone calls had continued to pour into the newspaper as readers contacted the reporters to express outrage at FEMA, to congratulate them on their work, or to suggest new angles to pursue. It was from one such phone call that Kestin and O’Matz learned about the young inspector who would become central to the next phase in their investigation.

Training. Late in October, the reporters were contacted by a woman who had been following the team’s FEMA coverage. She had noticed that in a few stories FEMA claimed that inspectors verified all damage before the agency approved grant money but, based on the experience of one young inspector she knew, she doubted that the inspector system was an effective safeguard against fraud. She suggested the reporters contact Johanna Hadik, 22, a FEMA inspector who lived near Fort Lauderdale and had received only perfunctory training from the agency. Hadik told them when reached that she had been sent out to verify damage claims with only eight hours of training. “I didn’t know if I could do it,” she admitted. ^[31]

The reporters found other inspectors through their Internet searches. Many confirmed that they too had received hurried and cursory training from FEMA as the agency struggled to recruit hundreds of additional inspectors to handle the onslaught of claims in the aftermath of the four hurricanes. They described FEMA’s policy of relying on applicants’ own testimony to their property damage, even when such damage was not physically apparent. “We’re told the occupants know their dwelling the best and we should take as much from them as possible,” one said. ^[32] Many said that they had received no instruction on how to distinguish between disaster-related damage and the long-term effects of poor maintenance. O’Matz and Kestin also learned that inspectors were paid by the inspection, which encouraged them to complete a large number in a short period of time.

By Thursday, October 28, Kestin and O’Matz had gathered enough evidence to begin crafting another story about how FEMA inspectors were trained; they completed it in time for that Sunday’s paper . They had come a long way, but each story raised as many questions as it answered. Since beginning the investigation in September, the reporters had exposed doubts about the legitimacy of individual assistance claims in Miami-Dade County, as well as about the inspectors on whom FEMA relied to verify them. Their reporting had generated responses from knowledgeable readers who had suggested other avenues to explore. By interviewing dozens of sources, they had identified suspicious patterns in aid distribution.

But much of the evidence so far was anecdotal. They had found instances of fraud. But to their amazement, FEMA officials, including Director Brown, continued to insist that the Sun-Sentinel ’s reporting did not reflect problems with FEMA’s own procedures. On the contrary, Brown claimed that Miami-Dade residents had sustained damage from the storm, and that they needed and deserved the aid they had received. With Demma’s encouragement, the reporters continued to seek stronger evidence that systematic fraud had occurred.