Health Concerns: Mold

We have all seen news reports or read articles about mold as an environmental issue.  I’ve never really paid much attention to it until now.  A previous Blog referred to Flash Floods we had in NH about a month and a half ago.  Those floods actually caused water to seep into our new office suite at work.  Our office suite is in the basement of a very old building that was renovated about a year ago at a cost of about $15,000,000.  It’s a beautiful building and our office suite is equally as nice.

The water had soaked all the carpets in all our offices and after efforts to remove all the moisture the decision was made a few weeks ago to remove and replace the carpeting.  This was detcided after a co-worker got really sick from an allergy she has to mold.  In preparation for new carpeting a few of us took a baseboard off the wall as we suspected there may be a bigger issue.  We were correct: there was mold growing behind the baseboards.  This led to further investigation and we then determined that there was mold growing in the walls on the back of the sheetrock (the picture shows the back side of a piece that was removed).

After we nagged a bit more the decision was finally made to bring in a professional company to investigate and resolve the issues.  I’m very glad this happened as they affirmed the concern and will now handle the abatement.

In the meantime I got a Mold Test Kit from a company called Pro-Lab.  In a matter of 2 days my petrie dish grew a very thick coating of mold…..  This environment is not good and thus I feel it’s best to start working at other locations out of my laptop bag ASAP.  This picture shows the mold.  Realize in the picture it looks white but it’s actually more of a gray (I’m not a great photographer)….

The abatement will take about a month.  They will remove all the mold-infested sheetrock, clean all surfaces (including walls and furniture), run air-quality tests, and retrofit the bottoms of our walls with a material that resists mold (should we ever have a similar water problem in the future).  I started packing my office today.

This entry was posted on September 25, 2008 at 10:38 am and is filed under Health & Environment. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response or trackback from your own site.