Hurrican Katrina wasn’t bad for everybody. Super-sized contractors like Bechtel and Halliburton have found the Katrina clean-up work to be a great source of funds to make up for the contracts they lost in Iraq due to overcharging and general incompetence. CorpWatch has a lot of good info (Disaster Profiteering on the Gulf Coast story and the key findings).
Not only are these companies generally doing very poor jobs, the local companies who really need the work either get locked out of the bidding are end up having to be sub-contractors or even sub-sub-contractors. After the big guys take their huge margins, the local companies end up barely covering their costs.
One of CorpWatch’s key findings concerned debris removal and the tarps put on roofs.
Abusive “contracting pyramids†that leave the actual subcontractors doing the work with only a tiny amount of the money paid by the federal government.Â
If you had read the comments from workers (and from the greedy contractor) on my previous post about Operation Blue Roof, this finding won’t be much of a surprise.
I work for a company that was a sub contractor for KBR in a contingency feeding response and was not paid. Now what happens to these under paid or non paid companies when the next storm happens? If you know of any other sub contractors out there who were not paid by KBR tell them to get in touch with me.