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December 21, 2006
Are we winning the War on Mold?
Reports from the front lines in HumCo's never-ending struggle
story and photo by CAMERON LANGFORD
As Eric Stockwell, general manager of the New Life
Service contracting company, led his guest through company headquarters
in Eureka, he smiled, turned his glance to the air and evaluated
an invisible presence.
"Do you smell the mold?" he asked. "It's
everywhere."
He was only kidding, but if anyone could sniff
out trace elements of the
Humboldt County's curse in New Life's sterile offices, Stockwell
would be the guy. The engaging, 30-something, blue-eyed manager,
whose boyish charm is underscored by his braces, is more attuned
to mold than most folks not currently suffering from it. Though
he graduated from UC Davis with a degree in anthropology, Stockwell
has since devoted his talents to becoming one of the county's
top mold-busters -- a full-time warrior in the soggy North Coast's
eternal battle against the natural forces that wish to eat our
homes, one by one.
Right: Excessive mold growth on drywall.
Mold spores are undetectable to the naked eye.
They're simple organisms, and they're everywhere, and in a rainbow
of varieties -- brown, brownish-purple, gray, dark green, black
and even white. They're in the air you're breathing as you walk
outside, swirling secretly about your person. In this outdoor,
airborne form, they're virtually harmless. Along with their fungi
kin, mushrooms and yeasts, molds play a crucial role in breaking
down organic material and recycling nutrients in the environment.
These substances provide sustenance for molds. Once the spores
secure a food source they only need one thing already in utter
abundance on the North Coast to reproduce with the vigor of oversexed
gremlins -- moisture.
Unfortunately, these spores are present indoors,
and, as anyone who has lived on the Humboldt County coast for
any amount of time can attest, that's where things become problematic.
While no one minds the mold going about its business in the forest,
it's a different matter inside your own home. For its indoor
dining, mold enjoys a buffet of man-made materials -- sheetrock,
tile, books. As long as there's a little water for it to land
on, mold will make a pig of itself, wholeheartedly attempting
to devour your humid bathroom, kitchen sink, leaky plumbing,
wet carpet, damp drapes.
In his bookcase-laden office, far from any of the
dirty work one imagines serious mold removal would entail, Stockwell
plots strategy against the enemy. When he gets the call from
a homeowner who finds himself on the losing end of a skirmish,
he'll spring to action, making an on-site visit to assess the
state of play. Later, he sends out his soldiers -- trained mold
specialists wearing jeans and black polo shirts bearing the company's
logo.
In his 11 years at the company, which specializes
in fixing structural damage brought by the elements, Stockwell
has seen it all. With regards to mold, he's found that sometimes
people's fears of the threat, which often include worries about
its effect on their health, overtake the reality.
"There's a certain amount of hype and hysteria
there," Stockwell said. "Women in an office building
will call and say, 'It smells musty and I've had this cold longer
than I should have,' and I don't see it. And they'll say, 'Well,
it's in the air.'"
Most times, though, the mold is real, and sometimes
the carnage is grim. One call that particularly impressed Stockwell
involved a multi-floor, unoccupied vacation home in Shelter Cove.
A broken hot-water pipe somewhere at the top of the four-bedroom,
two-bath dwelling had fed a colony of mold spores that was now
living it up, free to spread its splotchy, black plague until
what grew resembled a perverted paint-by-numbers illustration
gone severely awry. The house required an extreme makeover. New
Life stripped the entire home of its walls and flooring, threw
away the dry wall and insulation. In cases this severe, the company
usually calls in specialists to measure the air for mold spores
afterwards. Many times, Stockwell said, he calls on Terry Clark,
an environmental consultant for Eureka's Winzler and Kelly.
"You're looking for specific mold types you'd
find due to moldy building materials," said Clark, whose
authoritative pipes resemble a nightly newscaster's "voice
of God." "We'll compare results from outdoor and indoor
samples. Hopefully, if it's remediated, we should find no samples,
or the same amount, or less than outside."
We've all heard of and cringed at the fabled black
mold, but both Stockwell and Clark indicated this term is simply
a generalization for many of the 2,000 varieties of mold. However,
one particular mold with a name straight out of a nightmare --
Stachybotrys chartarum -- is a known pathogen, Clark said.
Most often, mold contamination poses no threat
to health. But Clark said some molds in high concentration, when
combined with a susceptible person or repeated exposure, can
be carcinogenic and deadly. He has first-hand evidence of mold's
ability to ravage those unaware of its presence. "My father-in-law
was a corn farmer in Iowa," he said. "And he inhaled
corn mold from wet corn in a silo, and it destroyed his lungs."
But mold, while everywhere, is hard to pin down.
If mold, under the right conditions can become deadly, when can
we know when the levels are unsafe? This question was on the
minds of the California legislature in 2001, when it passed the
Toxic Mold Protection Act (Senate Bill 372). The statute mandated
the state Department of Health Services to conduct tests, with
the goal of setting guidelines for how much mold exposure is
too much.
"I do lead testing, and in those situations
you have thresholds or permissible exposure limits and if you're
below that level [your home] is clean," Clark said. But
when it comes to mold, he said, scientists haven't been able
to determine a threshold. "It would take them a great deal
of time and money to do it, and they don't have the budget,"
he said. Besides California's absence of a standard, there are
no federal mold guidelines either.
This elusive quality of mold is why the county
division of environmental health only investigates mold they
can see, or that emanates from obvious structural deficiencies.
The department receives an estimated 300 mold-related calls a
year, and though winter is the wettest season locally, it doesn't
necessarily elicit the most responses. The increased temperature
of summer can also cause mold problems.
Many times, said Kevin Metcalfe, a county environmental
health specialist, the mold issues stem from the occupants' neglect
or "operational" issues. Under such circumstances a
perfectly well-built home will fall victim to mold because people
don't ventilate or attend to problem areas -- water-logged window
sills, leaky roofs, etc. Often times, Metcalfe added, the presence
of mold has to do with the type of housing. Older homes with
less ventilation, and particularly Victorians, are more of a
challenge due to poor insulation causing temperature differences
(uneven heating).
One thing Metcalfe does in his own home to increase
air circulation is to move all his furniture four to six inches
from the wall to prevent moisture from being trapped between
the surfaces and result in mold growth.
For Kim Horn, a McKinleyville resident, that advice
could have saved her antique desks from turning blue from the
heartless fungus. Two years ago, Horn opened her closet and found
the walls had turned blue. Even her leather jackets had taken
on the hue of hungover Smurfs. Why? Aside from the cracked concrete
slab which allows moisture to enter through the floor of her
apartment, Horn said the location of the closet led to the outbreak.
Since the closet is against an outside wall that's constantly
collecting water, eventually that moisture found its way inside
and blossomed in a shade of Blue Raspberry Blow Pop.
Horn didn't contact the county about the mold in
her apartment because she feared retaliations from her landlords.
"A lot of times they'll say, 'If you can't handle it, we'll
get someone in there who can,'" she said. Instead, she covered
her windows with plastic, bought a $5 salt substance from Rite-Aid
that pulls moisture from the air into a small receptacle that
"really works."
Not contacting the county to complain about the
problem was a smart move on Horn's part -- they likely wouldn't
have done anything more than to give her some literature, advice
and a good-luck pat. The county's health department, Metcalfe
said, acts as a housing authority only in the unincorporated
areas of the county. They do, however, investigate housing code
violations county-wide. The agency generally acts as a referee
between the city, landlord, and complaining tenant to ensure
a mold-ridden home or apartment meets housing standards. Moving
someone out due to health concerns with the rampant fungus would
be extremely rare, if not extraordinary, Metcalfe said.
Though experts may not be exactly sure just how
damaging this uninvited guest can be, just how much havoc it
can wreak on our immune system, the consensus is that while mold
is dwelling in homes throughout Humboldt County and the world
over, and pops up with the ease of clover in the grass, eradicating
the fungus is in your best interests.
"If someone thinks they're experiencing adverse
health effects they should really be evaluated," Metcalfe
said. "If you can see or smell a mold problem then it should
be taken care of."
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