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ANDREW BRAUM, BSME ’94
In the wake of Hurricane Sandy, one engineer’s refusal to stay silent helped turn the tide against fraud
public instead and eventually became the centerpiece of a “60 Minutes” exposé that would ultimately lead to allegations of wide-scale fraud involving numerous insurance companies, their contract engineering firms and FEMA itself. Was your first reaction to Sandy personal or professional? It was personal. The day after the storm, we woke up and there was no power. We lost a tree, but we live far enough from the water that we weren’t affected by flood. What really hit home for me and my children was when we went down to South Merrick and there were boats all over the place—in the middle of the street and on peoples’ lawns. It was around Halloween, so we gathered candy and clothing from CONTINUED At Buffalo SPRING 2016
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JOHN EMERSON
Storm Watcher
By Mark Norris » In the weeks after Hurricane Sandy struck Long Island in October 2012, engineers were called upon to assess the structural damage to thousands of homes along the South Shore. The reports they filed were to eventually form the basis of insurance payouts to homeowners, as is typically the case after a natural disaster. But the story of Andrew Braum (BSME ’94), an engineer who lives on the South Shore, is anything but typical. About a year after the storm hit, the third-party firm that had hired Braum to complete damage inspections of homes asked him to sign off on the 200-plus reports he had submitted. He insisted on reading them first—and that’s when he discovered that most of his reports had been altered in the insurance company’s favor. Under pressure to sign anyway, Braum went