Mold in homes after Hurricane Sally: What is it? What does it do? What can be done? - Pensacola News Journal
After the storm, comes the mold.
Floods, rain, no power, no air conditioning and Florida heat create prime and perfectly-moistened conditions for mold to spawn anew.
And after Hurricane Sally, mold has grown fast and wild in Pensacola.
Neither businesses nor homes have been spared. Most structures that sustained intense water damage last week quickly developed mold colonies.
Mold is potentially dangerous to humans and it's recommended you get it completely removed from your house as soon as possible. As the colloquialism goes, “Get-it, gone.”
“You want to minimize your risk against those spores, especially this year,” Theodore Fox, a mold expert, told the News Journal. “You can get an infection from mold spores that’s going to weaken your body enough that you might get a coinfection with COVID-19.
"So this year," he added, "it is a very important issue to think about."
Fox is an associate professor of biology at the University of West Florida whose research often focuses on fungi’s effects on other organisms. “I pay attention to fungi, quite a bit,” he said.
“What we're dealing with here, in our current situation, is what most people are going to call black mold, because, that’s when you really start to notice it,” Fox said, of the dark splotches many people have seen on their homes' surfaces after the hurricane.
"But it's really going to be a whole range of species,” he said.
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By the time humans can see mold on a wall or in a refrigerator with their naked-eye without a microscope, it means thousands-upon-thousands of individual mold specimens have already amassed on top, next to and against one another.
By the time mold turns black, it's the process of forming a “fruiting body,” Fox explained. In laymen’s terms, the mold is getting ready to spread.
“When you actually see black mold, you’re seeing them in their reproductive mode, and when they release their spores — it depends on the species, but — the low end I’ve seen is like 20,000 and the high end is like over 100,000 spores being released at any one time.”
Every released spore can start its species’ growth process all-over again, eventually leading it to release its own thousands-upon-thousands of spores.
And, it’s those spores that can make humans sick.
“When they get airborne, we can breathe them in,” Fox said. “If they land on your skin, most of the time, as long as you wash them off, you’re fine … but, if they get into your lungs, that is sort of fertile ground for them to grow.”
If mold lands and tries to grow inside a human’s lungs, that person’s immune system fights it.
But, if a human gets too many spores in their lungs, then their “immune system goes into hyperdrive,” Fox explained. “And, that can cause you problems as well. You start accumulating fluids.”
According to the Center for Disease Control, mold can cause stuffy noses, coughing or wheezing, sore throats, skin rashes or burning eyes for some people. For people with asthma or who are allergic to mold, the fungi can cause more severe ailments.
Therefore, it’s best to reduce your risk of exposure. Fox acknowledged it will continue to be difficult to avoid mold for many people living in water-damaged areas in the wake of Hurricane Sally.
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Since the storm hit, local construction and restoration companies have been overloaded by demand.
Chris Hamilton, operations manager for Addison Riley, said that his business fielded over 600 calls in the first week after the hurricane.
“And they’re still coming in, in droves,” Hamilton said.
“The calls are ranging from ‘I’m missing a couple shingles,’ to simple water intrusion, to ‘I don’t have a roof,’ to ‘I had six feet of water in my house’ to a situation like this,” Hamilton said, standing Friday in front of the Cordova Lanes Bowling Center in Pensacola.
It was seventh day in row that Hamilton had crews at the Pensacola bowling alley removing mold from inside waterlogged walls, floors, carpets and even a bar.
Repairing water damage is not an overnight fix. If mold is visible on the outside of an interior wall, there's a chance that the entire inside of the wall is coated with the stuff.
“We have to get all the wet material out and put commercial grade dehumidifiers in to try and get the moisture level down, capture that water in buckets, dump it outside,” Hamilton explained. “We’ll do that for three to five days on average. It’s a three to seven-day process, not including the deconstruction.”
At the height of Hurricane Sally, the wind lifted portions of Cordova Lanes’ roof up, left it almost flapping in the wind and made room for driving rain to soak the interior of the bowling alley.
The business’s bar area was completely gutted. Hamilton said that mold started growing inside its walls within hours of the storm’s departure, and 10 commercial-grade dehumidifiers have been left running for hours at a time in to ensure no unwanted moisture remains when new sheetrock is sealed into place.
“If we come in here and just put fans in, all we’re going to do is stir those mold spores up,” Hamilton said. “They’ll settle somewhere else — if it’s got the right moisture, temperature and humidity — it’s going to grow there. So, we use a HEPA vacuum to capture everything that we can.”
The mold removal process can be expensive. Hamilton estimated that it may cost around $100,000 to completely restore an 1,800-square-foot, six room house that was flooded by several feet of water.
He stressed that it’s important for anyone who is considering such a restoration in the Pensacola area to choose a Florida contractor who knows well the physical demands that Sunshine State's heat and humidity ultimately always place on the buildings constructed inside its border.
“Make sure that whoever you get has a Florida contractor license,” he said, adding that standards differ between states.
One simple but temporary solution for anyone wanting to minimize their contact with visible mold growing in their home, only requires a simple spray bottle and water, according to Fox.
“Literally just spray the room or area you’re in. You don’t want to coat surfaces,” he said. “You want to get that mist to fall through the air and fall to the floor, and as it’s falling, you’re going to collect a lot of spores on there.”
Then, take a paper towel and wipe up the spores trapped on the floor, and later perhaps, consider killing their source — mold.
Colin Warren-Hicks can be reached at colinwarrenhicks@pnj.com or 850-435-8680.
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