At eight on Saturday morning, 11 employees of the Fairfax Department of Health were drinking coffee in the Huntington Community Center. For forty minutes, John Yetman briefed them on where to stalk their quarry (the darkness under the stairs is a particularly popular hiding place), how to catalogue its presence, and how to wipe it out. He briefed the team on the operation of the expensive, blaze orange sensors with LCD screens and sharpened metal prongs that each person will carry in a small, plastic briefcase as they go door-to-door down Arlington Terrace and Fenwick Drive. They will be alerting flooded residents that although the water in their basements has receded, another health hazard lurks in its wake. And it is growing.
Yetman is the Health Department’s expert on mold. The men and women he was briefing were about to conduct a house-to-house assessment of the mold problem in Huntington. Although most residents have thrown out possessions and stripped out parts of their houses that were obviously ruined by the floodwater, the county is concerned that many people may not be aware of how easily and quickly mold can grow if given the opportunity. Wood is the most common incubator for mold, but it can also grow in anything that has been waterlogged and does not dry out completely. Drywall and even concrete can harbor mold.
If left to grow unchecked, mold can quickly cover surfaces with a soft fuzz. But the health hazards it poses stem from the spores it releases. People breathe in mold spores with every breath, and at normal levels these spores are usually harmless. But when mold proliferates in enclosed environments, its spores can eventually reach densities that will affect healthy adults, often in the form of allergy problems. People with illnesses are more sensitive to the effects of mold. For asthmatics, it can trigger and aggravate attacks.
THE HEALTH Department’s assessment was not an inspection. “We’re just going into these homes to find out how people are doing,” said Tom Crow, Director of Environmental Health, “how many of the homes have the mold taken care of and how many have work to do.”
The Health Department workers each paired with a Fire and Rescue worker. Their primary tools were flashlights and orange moisture sensors with sharp prongs that could be jammed into wood in order to read its moisture levels. Any reading over ten percent would require further drying before a homeowner painted the wood or covered it over, otherwise “the studs will continue to warp and torque within the wall,” said Yetman. He said that he used a moisture meter to test a dry doorframe in his own home. It contained 0.2 percent moisture.
For drywall, even a one percent moisture rate would mean it had to be replaced. Drywall’s surface dries quickly and often hides a soggy interior. Yetman said any drywall that had contact with water should be ripped out. “Drywall doesn’t like water,” he said. “That’s why it’s called drywall. It starts to crumble.”
Even concrete walls can hold water and support mold. Yetman said that if cinderblock walls seemed damp, a homeowner could drill holes in them to allow the interstitial spaces to drain out.
BY 9 A.M., Tom Crow and James Dennis, a lieutenant with Fairfax Fire and Rescue, were knocking on doors at the eastern end of Arlington Terrace. Maria Portobanco let them inside her mother’s house at 2110. She told Crow they had hired a company to clean their basement, which had flooded to the ceiling. When they went down the stairs, the sound of a heavy fan roared against the cinderblock walls of the empty basement. An industrial fan was angled through a doorway into the space beneath the stairs. A dehumidifier sat in the same room.
Crow ran his flashlight across studs that lay exposed because the cleaning company had removed the ceiling tiles. “They’ve done a good job,” he said.
But as he looked more thoroughly, he began noticing pale, mint-green splotchings and splatterings on the wood. “All this up there, that’s all mold,” he said, pointing into a particularly moldy corner.
He called Portobanco down and talked her through what he had observed.
“You’ve got a fair amount of work to do here,” he told her. He said they should use soapy water and a stiff brush to wash down every inch of wood. Then they should disinfect the wood by mixing one cup of bleach with one gallon of water and applying it with a spray bottle. “You can call us when you’ve washed it, cleaned it out and dried it out,” he told Portobanco. “We can tell you, ‘Yeah that’s dry.’”
“They didn’t recognize the problem,” he said after leaving the house.
Crow and Dennis knocked on several more doors without results. After knocking and waiting several minutes, they left envelopes in the door with information about mosquitoes and how to clean their homes. There were two forms in the envelope, one that people could use to record the location and severity of mold in their homes and the other designed by the Virginia Department of Emergency Management to evaluate the extent of flood damage to basements. The information would go FEMA so that it could make a decision on whether to award federal assistance to individual residents. When residents were home, Crow filled out the former document and Dennis took charge of the latter.
AT 2100 Arlington Terrace, Michelle Jordan, a renter, was moving out. She said the basement had been her 19-year-old daughter’s bedroom. “Luckily she wasn’t there at the time,” Jordan said.
The basement was stripped bare. There was nothing to suggest that a teenage girl had ever occupied it. Pale lines on the cinderblock wall revealed where the landlord had torn off the drywall and the studs that had covered it. Jordan said the water had taken down the ceiling tiles on its own. She had found a flip-flop lodged in the ceiling after the water receded.
Crow pointed his light at several feet of shiny ductwork leading from the furnace. Jordan said the landlord had already replaced the furnace, which had been only two years old, and the water heater that he had installed three weeks before the flood. Crow said the old ductwork that remained would have to be cleaned out. Mold could grow both inside and out.
But he concluded that the basement was in good condition. He found mold on only one stud in the ceiling and a small patch under the stairs.
Jordan said this was not her first experience with mold. Her son had become sick in an old house because of mold growing in the baseboards.