Sources of Water Damage in a Building
by Lee Thomassen
[My school system provided a short report concerning water damage in my school to the Office of Civil Rights in 2011. Said report was obtained in a Freedom of Information Act request in October of 2011. On advice of Counsel, I am noting that it is the opinion of the school system that damage from water intrusions in the building has been minimal and has been dealt with appropriately. Several areas of the school that suffered water damage during the 2010-2011 school year were not reported to OCR. ]
The school that I work in has individual unit ventilators in each classroom with no universal air ventilation system in the overall building. Only the main office area has a forced air system for air conditioning and ventilation that uses duct work and operates throughout the year. Individual classroom unit ventilators handle the air intake and filtration. The units exchange air in the classroom with fresh air from the outside. This allows carbon dioxide to be removed from the classroom. In the old days before the units were installed in 2004, the indoor air environment would be saturated with CO2 by the end of the day. Drowsiness and headaches were the primary result. The units provide heat during the winter from hot water pipes attached to a boiler, but they do not provide air conditioning. The school is a sweltering furnace at the beginning and end of the school year. The custodial staff often works in 100 degree temperatures with 90 percent humidity during the summer months.
As an educator, I read Chapter 8 of Surviving Mold with particular interest (“The Belperons: A Family Adrift in a Sea of Ignorance”). The Belperons faced exposure to multiple toxins both at home and at school. On page 175, there are several important references to water-damage in schools. After a storm, “…carpet and building materials were being thrown out of the second floor…” to waiting dumpsters below. “In the second reference, “Pipes froze and burst, roofs leaked, and waste water holding tanks backed up.” A Nor’easter had torn away “…a portion of the roof flashing, only to reveal that significant sections of rain and ice barrier were never installed.” This is more information than most parents get about water damage. There is an unwritten rule in schools that parents are not to be informed about building issues that could affect the health of children. It is tantamount to treason for a teacher to confide information about an unhealthy building to a parent. Not that school systems actually have anything to worry about. It is my experience that most teachers in a school building are blissfully ignorant about the majority of indoor air quality issues.
The type of ventilation system in a building has a major effect on how widespread the damage will be. Universal ventilation systems in a water-damaged building tend to cause poor indoor air quality in a large area of the building. Without a universal air circulation system to facilitate the spread of spores and airborne bacteria, schools like mine tend to have localized areas of contamination.
As a teacher and an eye-witness, I will record what I have observed about the types of damage caused by water intrusions in my school building and how that damage was handled by the custodial and facilities personnel. As a rule of thumb, water intrusions have multiple points of entry in a water-damaged building. The following areas with water-damage are of particular concern in my building:
1. The main lobby and the gym lobby – sometimes it is hard to tell if ceiling panels are wet because of a hydrostatic leak related to an aging flat roof or a leaky sprinkler system or even pipe condensate. The lobby areas in my building have a combination of the first two. The flat roof is over fifteen years old, and a good storm can saturate a ceiling panel overnight. A gaping hole in the ceiling panel array with a large trash can underneath it is a good indication of a roof leak. We had three large trashcans in the lobby after Hurricane Irene swept through Maryland in August of 2011 (with additional trashcans on the second floor). Replacing a school’s roof is an expensive proposition. Likewise, shutting down and draining the pipes in the heating and sprinkler system is a major time-consuming procedure that can only be done during the sweltering summer months when the school is largely unoccupied. If the pipe joints have asbestos solder, federal AHERA regulations come into effect and that can cause a dramatic increase in the repair’s price tag. The Department of Facilities has provided a reservoir of replacement ceiling panels to “swap out” the damaged ones. When Maryland Governor Martin O’Malley, County Executive Jim Smith and MD State Superintendent Nancy Grasmick visited my school on November 11, 2009, over two-dozen water-damaged ceiling panels in the main lobby and gym lobby were “swapped out” prior to the visit (we even got additional cleaning staff that week!). In August of 2011, the policy of replacing water-damaged ceiling panels ceased. A dozen gaping holes in the ceiling panel array greeted parents during National Education Week, but it probably looked better than wet and water-stained ceiling panels. On November 21, when the parents were safely out of the building, the gaps were filled with new ceiling panels. A stack of unused ceiling panels sits in the abandoned boy’s shower room adjacent to the gymnasium for future swap outs. Needless-to-say, bacterial activity in the lobby has the potential to be a serious health issue for the students and staff.
2. The library and adjacent hallway – there was a major flood in the fall of 2005. A failed pressure test on the new heating system caused an improperly installed cap to blow. The huge photocopier below the pipe was destroyed by hundreds of gallons of water flowing unimpeded from the pipe. The second floor library, the library workroom and the book storage room were all damaged. The art room (119) and two adjoining work storerooms on the floor below had cascades of water flowing down the walls. The library has also had water intrusions caused by two leaky air conditioners. Until they were replaced with new energy efficient models in 2010, the two antiquated air conditioners would get books wet and create large puddles on the floor. The hallway outside the library has had several sprinkler pipe leaks as well. If anything shows signs of visible mold, whether it be a book or a ceiling panel, the evidence is removed from the building by environmental services personnel and disposed of off-site without writing any reports or collecting any scientific data. If the custodial department thinks that no one is looking, they will use subterfuge to deal with the problem in their own unique ways. In one instance in the spring of 2011, mold was scrubbed off a second floor ceiling panel in the hallway near the library by a custodian and the damaged panel was left in place. In other instances, mold-contaminated ceiling panels were quietly disposed of in the school’s dumpster without notifying the school’s environmental team or the Dept. of Environmental Services. In a more brazen instance that I wrote about in Surviving Mold, the mold under a sink unit in the library workroom was scrubbed clean by a custodian even though the school system’s industrial hygienists were en-route to the school to inspect it. You would think that the perpetrator would get in trouble for such a blatant destructive act of environmental evidence. Nope – inspecting the mold was just a formality. It was going to be declared harmless anyway.
3. The first floor custodial room, the Dark Room (the old photography room), the art and foreign language storeroom, and the boys bathroom – this cluster of four adjoining rooms has had a string of bad luck. A clogged drain in the custodial sink (shown below) backed up and overflowed three–times monthly throughout the 2009-2010 school year (and probably in multiple years before that).The water would go through the bottom of the wall and flood the adjoining art and foreign language storeroom and the boy’s bathroom. As if this bathroom did not have enough problems, a clogged pipe was causing a toilet to erupt like a geyser and overflow daily for six weeks in the spring of 2011. Then to add insult to injury that same spring, a roof leak funneled water into the Dark Room and destabilized the asbestos floor tiles. Three of these rooms are less than ten feet from my classroom! With three serious sources of water intrusion in such a compact place, the Department of Facilities had its hands full. Solutions that were done correctly include fixing the place on the roof where the new window construction was allowing water in. Plumbers had some success in 2011 in opening up the two clogged drains. The asbestos tiles were replaced in the Dark Room, a book room and the art/foreign language storage room. Despite these successes, the Custodial Room still has a heavy smell of dirt. My recommendation was that the top plank of the wet wooden shelving at floor level be pulled up to clean out any accumulated dirt (and mold), but that has not happened.
4. Classrooms – A second floor Spanish classroom had a small leak in the ceiling in the fall of 2010 (probably from a sprinkler pipe). There was no prior history of mold or water intrusions in this room, yet some of the most aggressive toxigenic molds in the school developed visible colonies in this classroom during that ill-fated fall season. Several first floor science classrooms had water stains develop on the ceiling panels in 2010 (probably from overhead pipes). Mold formed on a ceiling panel in an 8th grade science classroom during the summer of 2011. A second floor math room had a huge round trashcan next to the teacher’s desk to catch the water that flowed into the classroom following rainstorms. On back-to-school night, water was coming down into the trashcan even though it had not rained in three days. There must have been a reservoir of water trapped on the flat roof from clogged drains.
5. The Weight Room – This basement room holds the weight-lifting equipment used by the Phys-Ed Department and the local Recreation Center. In September of 2011, it flooded badly during Hurricane Irene and again during Tropical Storm Lee. It had flooded on previous occasions during the 2010-2011. There is a two inch riser with wet unpainted wood at floor level in this room. The Department of Facilities stationed two high powered fans in the room to help dry it out. It did a good job pushing humid air from one part of the room to another. On September 8, 2011, an industrial-sized snake “roto-rootered” the outside drain that was causing the stairwell to fill up like a bathtub and flood the weight room after every storm.
6. The School Kitchen – Mold developed on a wet ceiling panel in the food manager’s office during the summer of 2010. The damaged ceiling panel was surreptitiously disposed of by the school’s custodial staff on or about October 14, 2010. This remediation did not show up in the school system’s report to OCR. I did not learn of the mold contamination until after the event, so I was unable to affect a microscopy study or ERMI. The custodian who removed the panel was ordered not to tell anyone. The following Monday, she came to my room and told me. In fact, the entire night custodial staff was told on December 9 that they were not allowed to talk to me anymore. I know the exact date because three of them came to my room later that evening and told me. Ten months later in October 2011, I saw mold on a water-damaged ceiling panel in the kitchen and I got to it first. The majority of the sample was Aspergillus ustus, but interestingly, there were small amounts of Stachybotrys chartarum and Chaetomium globosum present in the mold sample.
7. Miscellaneous storage rooms and hallways with water-damaged ceiling tiles – There are places on both floors of the school which have water stains on the ceiling panels from leaking sprinkler pipes or the leaky flat roof. As bad as roof damage can be, leaking pipes on the first floor are equally worrisome because they can sustain fungal and bacterial growth throughout the school year. Leaky pipes can nourish a fungal colony even when the heating system lowers the humidity level below 60% for much of the winter. I check these rooms and hallways periodically for signs of mold growth.
This is the water damage that I am aware of and have been able to document since 2005 (additional water damage prior to 2005 is documented in Surviving Mold chapter 20). For all I know, I am only scratching the surface. One thing that I can be sure of – there are schools across the country with descriptions of water damage just like what you read here and in Surviving Mold. By keeping water damage a secret, there are parents of sick kids with environmental-based illnesses running from one doctor to another who are oblivious that there is anything wrong with their neighborhood school.
In an age of ever-shrinking facilities repair budgets, the issue becomes whether or not a school system can successfully deal with the aftermath of water intrusions so that they do not lead to the growth of bacteria and fungi that can be pathogens to human health. Parents expect school systems nationwide to protect the health of the children who have been entrusted into their stewardship. Budgetary and fiscal constraints can make that expectation moot. Should a parent suspect that the building is causing their kid to be sick, principals are armed with reports from facilities personnel noting that the building in question has been thoroughly examined X-number of years ago and it received a clean bill of health. Once a building gets an IAQ clean bill of health, the report is paraded around like it is written in stone and anyone who challenges it is considered a heretic.
One of our environmental personnel once told me and my former principal that our school had not had sustained any serious water-damage that could lead to the growth of toxigenic mold; therefore, there cannot be a mold problem within the building. It is a perverse form of self-serving logic – deny the existence of water damage and that allows you to deny the existence of species of mold, metabolites and bacteria that can be pathogens to human health.
The school system’s health office, however, made its own determination independent of the water-damage debate. It is their job to analyze the attendance in all of the schools on a yearly basis and compare them to each other. They were clearly concerned about the high rate of student absenteeism. According to their statistical analysis, my school was one of the top five sickest schools in the county during the 2009-2010 school year (and that is out of 175 schools and centers). Our road to bacterial and fungal perdition was paved with the absentee notes of our sick student population.
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