Karen Gadbois is taking New Orleans by a different kind of storm than the one that ravaged the city in 2005. She is a champion to some, an annoyance to others.

Gadbois travels around the hurricane- and flood-ravaged city to tour areas promised by the federal and/or local government to be cleaned up, or rebuilt. She then blogs about her findings on her website called "Squandered Heritage."

A few months ago, she discovered a city renovation program run by the New Orleans Affordable Homeownership Corporation (NOAH) was not actually fixing up houses as it was supposed to.

"Last year at this time we were working feverishly on the issue of the illegal demolition of people’s homes," she wrote on the site August 1. "This year we have been working just as feverishly on the nonexistent home-gutting program."

The New York Times reports that in just the past three weeks, Gadbois caused an explosion after she discovered that the federally financed program to gut and repair the storm-damaged homes of the poor and elderly, on which the city spent $1.8 million, has been exposed as — at least partly — a sham. There were shady contractor connections, ownership issues and money mysteries involved in the program. The agency running it suspended the program on August 1.

But in a place where big public funds slosh around and often don’t go to the projects they’re designated for, and Katrina victims’ needs are so great, Gadbois’s activism is incendiary.

The FBI on Monday raided the agency running the program and the local U.S. attorney is now investigating. Local news stations and The Times-Picayune have since reported of business connections between the program’s former director and some of its contractors, one of whom was Mayor Ray Nagin’s brother-in-law.

Nagin, who was brought before the City Council, had complained about what he called "amateur investigations," and criticized local television reporters for following up on Gadbois’s discoveries. Nagin said it was "completely untrue" that federal money had been misspent on work never finished. A few days later, however, he admitted there were "documentation issues" and "discrepancies" in NOAH’s remediation program.

Gadbois is now taking photos of houses NOAH has on its agenda to fix up, along with some of the money amounts paid to contractors to do the work.

Gadbois told the Times she was appalled that public money was being used to rehab a house, and later to demolish it, often by agencies sharing the same office space. What’s worse is that houses NOAH was supposed to be working on just weren’t done, even though they were listed as "remediated."

"We thought: this is bigger than us," she said.