What’s Furry and Thirsty and Loves the Dark?

[Guest guest]

What's Furry and Thirsty and Loves the Dark?

New York Times - New York,NY

By SUSAN STEWART

http://www.nytimes.com/2007/05/20/nyregion/nyregionspecial2/20Rmold.h

tml?pagewanted=1 & ei=5087%0A & em & en=e4b13b07528bacaf & ex=1179806400

IT'S spring: time to plant perennials, clean closets — and call the

microbial inspector. What does spring cleaning mean in the age of

green? For many of us, it means fear.

Homeowners whose grandparents beat rugs and washed windows worry

about more than dirt. So what if the baseboards are dusty? The lead

in the paint could be lowering your toddler's future SAT scores. The

air may be fragrant with the season's first blooms, but that doesn't

make you safe from colorless, odorless gases like radon and carbon

monoxide. And, by the way, you're sneezing. Is it a cold, or is it

mold?

Household nightmares often capture the public imagination for a

while and then fade away. Asbestos, lead and radon, riveting in the

1970s and 1980s, are still around, but they're old news. Mold, which

started making headlines in the 1990s, is in. And with the recent

flooding throughout the region, mold inspectors and remediators can

barely handle the business.

" People are really irritable right now, " said Margaret Ann Furer, a

contractor and mold mitigator in Katonah, N.Y. She was not referring

to the hardest-hit victims of the recent northeaster and subsequent

flooding; people who lose their homes to water have much more to

worry about than mold. But mold is one of the most common and

insidious aftereffects of even minor flooding, and when a wet spring

season connects with a less than watertight house — or when moisture

is trapped in an airtight house made of mold-conducive materials —

it can make for a bumper crop.

Mold is a furry, thirsty fungus. Outdoors, it earns its place in the

ecosystem by breaking down wood, leaves and plant debris. Indoors,

it breaks the hearts of homeowners, mostly by attacking their

pocketbooks.

" Mold is the hot topic right now, " said Weitz, a certified

microbial inspector and a principal in RTK Environmental Group, an

environmental testing company in Connecticut.

On a cloudy April day, Mr. Weitz is examining the entrance of Jay

and Bacal's multilevel contemporary house in northern

Westchester County.

" This is Cladosporium mold, " he says, pointing to grayish shadows

near the front door. " This is opportunistic, a dark area without

much light. And this house is covered in a solid stain, and mold

loves solid stain. "

Loves? Mr. Weitz is creeping us out already, and we're not even

inside the house. Is it . . . alive?

" Mold is not dead or alive, " he says reassuringly. " It is viable or

nonviable. "

But what if mold is merely dormant? That is another story. Mold

feeds on organic materials and is brought to life by moisture. When

a water source is removed but existing mold is left, according to

Mr. Weitz, " the spores, if you will, start to panic. "

" They go through the process of sporulation, " he said. " They throw

themselves toward water sources. " We feel like throwing ourselves

back in the car, but instead we move indoors.

The pale spring sun fills the high-ceilinged living room,

illuminating the area where a trickle of water once made its way

down the chimney wall. " Water was leaking from a ceiling pipe in the

lowest level of the house, " Mr. Weitz says. " They've already removed

the carpet on that level and replaced it with tile. "

WE head downstairs to a finished walk-out basement. At the foot of

the steps, on the new tile, Mr. Weitz places a small white object

atop a chest-high tripod. This is a monitoring device that can

detect elevated levels of mold spores in the air, even in rooms

where mold is not visible.

Crouching, Mr. Weitz peers behind a heater against the back

wall. " There's a little bit of mold here, " he says, in the calm,

considered tone of a doctor reading the results of a blood

test. " All very typical. "

Mr. Weitz spends two hours or so going through a residential

property, checking for radon, asbestos, lead and, of course, mold.

He takes baseline readings of air quality inside and out (some

neighborhoods are naturally moldier than others). He charges $400 to

$500, and a few hundred more for lab costs. But if you have a mold

problem, that cost is only the beginning. Nightmare stories aside, a

typical suburban remediation, according to several local

remediators, runs from $2,000 to $4,000, though some reach $12,000.

" Mold is a health concern for a very limited population, " said

Wiles, executive director of the American Indoor Air Quality

Council, which certifies microbial inspectors like Mr.

Weitz. " However, mold is a financial issue for everyone, as it

reduces the value of their assets. "

Even if the mold in your house isn't causing discomfort to you,

odds are that it will make potential buyers very queasy. Most mold

isn't toxic to most people, but mold has had a toxic reputation

since 1993, when a cluster of children in Cleveland suffered

pulmonary hemorrhages linked, although inconclusively, to the

presence of a mold called Stachybotrys in their homes.

Then in 2001, a Texas jury awarded Melinda Ballard $32 million in

a " bad faith " lawsuit against Farmers Insurance Group of Companies

after mold was discovered throughout her 22-room house. (The award

was lowered to $4 million two years later.)

In 2003, ny Carson's former sidekick, Ed McMahon, and his wife,

Pamela, were awarded $7.2 million from American Equity Insurance in

a California court. Mold, the McMahons' lawsuit claimed, killed

their sheepdog Muffin and caused health problems for them and their

staff, forcing them to leave their six-bedroom home for six months.

These and other cases helped to create a virtual industry around a

fungus that has been among us forever.

Five years ago, the air-quality council listed 1,000 certified

microbial inspectors on its books. Today, there are 5,000. Is there

more mold, or are we just more worried about it?

Both, said Bernzweig, owner of Spectrum, a remediation

company in Scarsdale.

" For one thing, houses are more tightly built, so moisture builds

up, " he said.

Houses today are also made with materials like drywall that are mold-

friendly and that are often left out in the rain and installed wet,

Mr. Bernzweig said.

In addition, he said, " people want to be comfortable, " so they put

humidifiers in their heating systems.

" It's a Catch-22, " said Lamielle, executive director of the

National Center for Environmental and Health Strategies, a lobbying

group for people with chemical sensitivities. " You caulk your

windows to save energy, and that leads to more toxin growth. "

As a result of the environmental movement, recycling has also

increased, which means that more and more organic materials are

being used in construction. When damp, wallboard coated in recycled

newspaper provides a delicious meal for mold, Mr. Weitz said.

Thanks in no small part to the Ballard case and the attention it

drew, mold-damage claims skyrocketed a few years ago. Insurers paid

$1.4 billion in mold claims in 2001, and twice that the next year.

The level of such payouts has not pleased the insurance industry,

which has taken steps to limit coverage for mold damage.

" Mold has been around longer than humans, " said P. Hartwig,

president and chief economist of the Insurance Information

Institute. " The entirety of our existence has been in the company of

mold. Why had insurance adjusters never seen a mold claim before

2002? It wasn't because a new strain of mold had been unleashed upon

the earth. It was the trial lawyers. "

Most homeowners policies have caps for mold damage, but do cover

water damage. " It was never the intent of policies to cover mold, "

Mr. Hartwig said. " The vast majority of mold is failure to perform

some kind of maintenance. "

" If a tree comes into your house and it takes a few weeks to repair

the water damage, the mold resulting from that water damage would be

covered, " he said. " But it has to be mold that happened just because

of the water damage. "

And the only way to prove that is to call your insurer

quickly. " It's incumbent on you as a homeowner to report damage as

quickly as possible to the insurer, " Mr. Hartwig said. " First, it

helps to keep the damage from getting worse. Second, if you wait it

becomes harder to see which damage was caused by the incident and

which was not. "

Mr. Hartwig was speaking from his son's Little League game in

Elmsford where, he noted, the Saw Mill River had done some recent

damage. He said this is the time to buy flood insurance, which is

distinct from homeowner's insurance. " Because it takes 30 days for a

policy to go into effect, " he explained, " and most of the floods are

from remnants of tropical storms. And we're coming up on tropical

storm season. "

Mr. Weitz makes his way slowly through the Bacals' house, from

bottom to top. He notes a kitchen cabinet " delaminated " by a nail

puncture in the dishwasher hose. He wields a digital moisture meter —

eerily reminiscent of the Geiger counters in old science fiction

movies — to see if a stain on the garage ceiling is a new leak or an

old one.

" Every building shows a history, " he says, " and it's your job to

find out if the history is ancient or recent. "

Mr. Weitz started out as a contractor, but became absorbed in

environmental issues. " I've probably done 3,000 inspections, " he

says. His company, RTK, does not do remediation, just detection.

Checking for mold and then charging to remove it would be a conflict

of interest, he says.

He developed his soothing manner out of necessity. " We get some

people who call who are literally in tears, " he says. " And that is

really not the exception. "

When Traci Ludwig, the owner, with her husband, , of an 1884

house in Mamaroneck, called in the mold people a few years ago, she

was only mildly hysterical.

" We had white and fuzzy mold, we had brown mottled mold, we had

black mold, " she said. " It was a scientific study of mold. "

It was all in the wine cellar — the only room in the basement that

had been redone by the previous owner.

" Sometime in the 1960s the previous owner had put in walls, " Ms.

Ludwig said. " There were beautiful old wine casks and shelves. "

There was also water, leaking from the terrace above and dampening

the new plasterboard.

" We moved in on Friday, the 13th of December, in 2002, " Ms. Ludwig

said. " There was no mold smell. As the months got warmer, we were

overcome by a very strong smell. The children were coughing. After

some thinking we put it together and realized they and we were

probably breathing in mold spores. "

After testing, Ms. Ludwig called an environmental firm in

Scarsdale. " They put tarps in the yard, and men in white suits kept

going in and out, " she said.

Today the mold is gone, and so is the wine cellar. " It's just an

empty room at the moment, " Ms. Ludwig said.

In suburban Connecticut, the owner of a 10-year-old house with a

5,000-square-foot basement moved his 1,200-bottle wine collection to

the garage when he found mold on the wallboard behind the basement

paneling after some minor flooding. He estimated that he had spent

more than $100,000 diagnosing and eradicating the mold problem and

returning his basement to its original condition. But he's still not

sure why he responded the way he did.

" I grew up on a farm, and mold was everywhere. I certainly didn't

feel any side effects, " he said. " But the issue now is, if you're

going to sell a house, you have to take care of these things. The

industry has done a good job of marketing itself. "

The homeowner spoke on condition of anonymity — not a rare

occurrence, in the murky world of mold.

Stone, a mold remediator whose company, Homeguard

Environmental, operates out of Stamford, said he deals with privacy

issues all the time. " Last week a woman said, `Do you have unmarked

trucks? Because I saw a truck in front of my neighbor's house that

said Toilet Doctor.' "

You won't be seeing trucks with decorative spores painted on them

anytime soon.

" It's hard, " Mr. Weitz says. " Mold is like a personal issue somehow.

People don't want to share. "

But Mr. Weitz loves to share. " As much as a fungus can have a

personality, I suppose mold does, " he says. " I'm fascinated by mold.

I could bore you for hours with all things mold. My wife says, `Bob,

you're a lot of fun at a cocktail party.' "

NOW Mr. Weitz is in the yard of the Bacals' house, noting where

shrubs are too close to the walls, where drainage away from the

house is insufficient, where roof tiles are missing. With our mold

consciousness raised, we notice some greenish scum around the deck.

" Green is algae, " Mr. Weitz says. " Algae is O.K. "

The Bacals learned the results of their testing within a week of Mr.

Weitz's visit. Some spores found in the lower level were

Stachybotrys, the scary mold. They're getting estimates from

remediation companies. They're not terribly concerned.

" I did get down on my hands and knees, and I saw some black smutty

stuff, " said Mr. Bacal, who has been using an air filtration device

he bought online to try to mitigate his acid reflux and sinus pain,

symptoms he thinks could be environmental in origin.

Would he ever think of getting rid of his three cats?

" Oh, definitely I'm not getting rid of the cats, " he said. " They're

family. "

His doorbell rang.

" Oops, got to go, " he said. " That's the guys who're coming to take

care of my mice. "