Mold attacks Lake in wake of heavy rains

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July 25, 2002

Mold attacks Lake in wake of heavy rains

By Phil Reynolds, Lake View

While Friends of the Park are cleaning up Lakeway's City Park, other

residents of the Lake area are cleaning up their homes - or having

crews do it. Jay of Steam Team in Austin said calls for mold

cleanup have increased at least 15-20 percent since heavy rains hit the

area, and calls for other water-related cleanup such as roof leaks and water

in houses have increased even more.

Crews from Steam Team have been working along the south shore of Lake

for more than a week, inspecting and cleaning homes and businesses damaged

by the rains. In fact, said, most of the water damage was on the

south side of the lake in Lakeway and Hudson Bend and " beyond the dam a

little bit. "

While crews are handling 30-40 jobs in the Lake area, there have been

" zero calls from Austin, " Marquardt of Steam Team confirmed.

A spokesman for Blackmon Mooring Water Damage Specialists confirmed that his

company had also seen an increase in calls, but had no specific figures on

the increase.

Marquardt said recent concerns about mold have led homeowners to consider

every case of mold potentially fatal. But he said only about 1 percent of

all mold invasions are toxic.

That determination is made by an industrial hygienist such as ez

of Round Rock, whom Steam Team uses on many of their calls.

ez typically tests and samples areas where mold is suspected. If mold

is established, he will set the scope of how much work will need to be done,

and then Steam Team will give the homeowner an estimate, said.

Final word on how much of the cleanup is covered will come from the

homeowner's insurance company, he said.

Though it might seem that the amount of rain, coupled with flood waters,

over the first part of the month makes a cleanup decision a foregone

conclusion, there has been " a lot of resistance (to paying for cleanups)

from the insurance companies, " said.

If mold is found, it can take two weeks to clean the house. Crews have to

manually clean the mold from every item in the house - from teddy bears to

kitchen knives to table lamps - and store them in a room that's already been

cleaned to prevent their being contaminated by items that still have mold on

them.

Workers - and anyone who enters a building that's being treated for mold -

must wear a filtering mask. The people who actually treat the items in the

home also wear disposable coveralls to keep mold from being carried into

treated parts of the building. They put the coveralls on when they enter the

clean room and remove them every time they leave. Mold is thus kept within

the suit, instead of being left to disperse around the clean room and

re-contaminate treated items.

" We don't try to dispossess homeowners, " said Marquardt, of Steam Team.

" Instead, we try to let them use the house as much as possible while we're

working. "

However, he admitted some residents could find that the sound of power saws

and other machinery - needed when mold is found inside walls - makes the

house as uninhabitable as the mold, at least while the work is going on.

While it's possible for an industrial hygienist to tell where mold came

from, it's unlikely he could tell whether the mold was caused by recent

rains.

" The mold itself could have gotten there 10 years ago, " said a Steam Team

worker. " Mold is activated by water. So that mold could have been there, and

the rains just caused it to activate. There's no way to tell. "

©Lake View 2002