Telluride Apartments: ‘dangerous building’

[Guest guest]

Telluride Apartments: `dangerous building'

Tue Aug 12, 2008

Daily Planet,Telluride,CO*

By Healy, staff writer

http://www.telluridenews.com/news/x1481394708/Telluride-Apartments-

dangerous-building

Telluride, Colo. -

When inspectors walked into Telluride Apartments, a white-walled

complex in Mountain Village, they found walls and ceilings painted

with mold. There was mold in the closets and bathrooms, mold

blooming on window sills and covering fiberglass insulation.

They found a litany of problems, from mold to pests to leaking

roofs, and on July 24, Village inspectors declared Telluride

Apartments a " dangerous building, " according to an eight-page notice

taped to the complex's front doors. The owners were told to bring

the building up to code by Aug. 31, or the building would be

evacuated.

" The ultimate goal is to bring this into what we call minimum

standards for living, " said Chad Root, Mountain Village's building

official.

Telluride Apartments, a 30-unit complex in the Meadows neighborhood,

is privately owned and managed, but serves many lower-income and

working families. Many residents are Latino immigrants who speak

mostly Spanish — a fact that could have allowed the mold problems to

go unchecked, officials said.

" They don't speak a lot of English, so they can live in these

conditions and don't complain, " Root said.

But some residents said they were intimately familiar with the mold

and had been battling it all spring and winter, scrubbing it from

the walls and baseboards and window sills. Two families said they'd

switched apartments to get away from the reappearing clusters of

black mold.

" My girls would get sick, but I really never knew if it was

dangerous because no one ever told me, " said one resident, who asked

not to be named because she feared reprisals from building

management.

The woman said she and her family have lived in Telluride Apartments

for seven years, but never saw severe mold problems until this

winter's deep, wet snows began piling up. When mold started

spreading in the closets, the woman would take out all the clothes

and scrub the walls with bleach. But the growths would return within

a few weeks, she said.

" You would see the stains, " she said. " It was really bad. "

The regional manager for Telluride Apartments directed a reporter's

phone call to Connie Bosley, who is connected to a Wyoming company

that runs the complex. No one connected with Telluride Apartments

returned phone messages yesterday.

But Dusty Atherton, an inspector for the Village's Design Review

Board, said the owners have been working to fix the problem.

Yesterday, apartment doors were papered with notices alerting them

that cleanup would begin soon, and that Village inspectors would be

coming through on Tuesday.

" They have been nothing but cooperative, " Atherton said.

This is the Village's second battle with mold this year. In late

April, one resident at the town-owned Village Court Apartments said

he'd gotten sick from mold inside his home, and inspectors found

mold growing on window casings, walls and ceilings in a few

apartments.

The Village quickly hired an environmental consultant to diagnose

and treat the problem. He inspected six of the " worst case "

apartments and found mold in four, including " very elevated " numbers

of airborne spores in one of the older apartments.

Inspectors are returning to Telluride Apartments today to examine

more homes, and Root suggested that the problem could be more severe

than the growths at Village Court.

" This is a lot worse, " he said. " We had entire walls and ceilings

covered in mold. "

When inspectors first went to Telluride Apartments, they found work

crews spraying fungicide to combat the rash of mold. But the

management hadn't obtained a permit before starting the eradication,

Root said.

" They were trying to cover up a massive amount of mold, " he said.

In all, Village inspectors delivered a 17-item cleanup list to the

owners of Telluride Apartments. It tells them to hire an

exterminator and industrial hygienist, to fix the roof, repair any

broken plumbing, and fix or replace the fire extinguishers,

emergency lights, hall lights and smoke alarms and concrete walkways.

" All deficiencies shall be fixed but are not limited to the items on

this list, " the notice says.

[Guest guest]

One of the problems taking place in Colorado is a general denial that

mold is a problem there. It is always the same statement, " We don't

have a mold problem here, it is too dry for mold to grow. " My

response to that was to ask some of these people in problematic

buildings what they thought the black patches were growing up the

wall. They responded, " Oh that, we will fix that with some paint. "

This country is in dire need of education that will not take place

unless major medical organizations begin to acknowledge that serious

health effects can and do occur from indoor exposure to mold and

other building contaminants resulting from water damage. I applaud

the American Academy of Environmental Medicine for recently making

public their position on the legitimate and serious nature of mold

exposure.

B

--- In , " tigerpaw2c " <tigerpaw2c@...>

wrote:

>

> Telluride Apartments: `dangerous building'

> Tue Aug 12, 2008

> Daily Planet,Telluride,CO*

> By Healy, staff writer

>

>

>

> http://www.telluridenews.com/news/x1481394708/Telluride-Apartments-

> dangerous-building

>