Mold leaves couple homeless

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Mold leaves couple homeless

Peorians bet cleanup will cost more than home's value

April 13, 2003

by Terry Bibotbibo@...Just ask Geza Biro about the bathtub. Then stand back for some Hungarian-flavored sputtering. "I've said many times," he winds up, then pauses for a breath. "If you want to build a new house, put in a new bathtub. Then see what happens." A shadow over 5 feet tall, temporarily freed from his oxygen machine, Geza is home for the first time since September. At the request of his wife, Veldah, we've come to tour their Central Peoria brick bungalow. It is obvious that every nook was once as carefully compact as the cabin of a ship. Not now. Other than a few festive hummingbirds decoupaged onto the kitchen cabinets, the place is a wreck. Stacks of stuff are piled on the counters and floors. We pick our way across the tiny room, hoping to see into the rest of the house. All the doorways are sealed shut. Geza's normally jaunty 80-year-old shoulders sag. He has lived here almost 40 years. "God not only punished me, he kicked me in the butt, too," he says. "Believe me, I hate to come back to see it." For the last six months, Geza and Veldah Biro have been living in a motel room near Northwoods Mall with nothing of their own but a few clothes. After a remodeling project last summer, they had to evacuate their house. It was full of mold - and they figure you could learn from their story. "For $850, we've been out of our home almost six months," Veldah says. "It's going to take $100,000 to fix up our house, which was probably about the value of it. Nothing makes sense anymore. Nothing." This started with a bathtub insert in August. ("She's never satisfied with anything. We had to have a new bathtub," Geza says. Veldah shrugs.) Apparently, some of the plumbing wasn't properly installed. The Biros did not know about it until family visited weeks later. With extra people using the bathroom, the water use mounted up. Veldah was making a salad in the kitchen when she heard the dining room ceiling collapse. "It was like a thundering herd of horses," she says. Pictures show mold on the rafters. As the first effort to clean up started, Veldah got sick. She was allergic to mold, and suddenly it seemed to be everywhere. They had to get out. Veldah figures all the stress caused a blood clot that temporarily paralyzed her from the waist down a couple of days after Thanksgiving. She still needs a walker, she's had a miserable flu for the last couple of weeks, and she just wants to go home. She can't. ServiceMaster Cleaning Specialists owner Jim Crisman says that a small mold contamination - less than 10 square feet - is relatively easy to clean up. For the Biros, it was hundreds of square feet. That means sealing the rooms, installing "negative airflow," which keeps mold from spreading by pumping air to the outside. Everything that can't be cleaned is removed and junked. Specially filtered vacuums are used. Everything left is wiped down by hand with detergents and biocides to kill the mold. Sealing products are applied. And each step of the way is monitored by a certified industrial hygienist. Their "mold remediation proposal" was 23 pages long, an estimated $39,000 for several weeks of work. But as more mold was found, the total grew to $49,000 - which does not include reconstruction. Most of the mold is gone now, but the Biros won't be going home for a while. Crisman points out that mold is everywhere and can't be completely avoided. In a case like this, there are three factors to look at: the type of mold, the amount of mold and how sensitive the occupants are to it. Certified industrial hygienist Haschert has not released the Biros' house. And Larry , the claims representative for their insurance company, is OK with that. "There's no way you can cut corners with the mold and the Biros," he says. "I know it's very inconvenient for them." says he has been a claims adjuster for 10 years and has never had a case like this before. Crisman says ServiceMaster has had about 20 of them in the last 14 months, but the Biros' house is on the high end: The average has been $10,000 to $20,000. "If the insurance company was just looking to save money, we'd just paint it, seal it, put the ceiling back up," says. Veldah and Geza Biro know that in several respects they are lucky. They know a woman who lost her house entirely, and many insurance companies have capped mold coverage at $10,000. "I don't feel angry at anyone, except I think it should have been done faster," Veldah says. "At our age, we shouldn't have to live anywhere else. We had decided we wanted to die in our own home." Hopefully, after all this, it won't be from mold.

Terry Bibo is a columnist for the Journal Star. Write her at 1 News Plaza, Peoria, IL 61643; call (800) 225-5757, Ext. 3189; or send e-mail to tbibo@....