TRAVIS TACKLES A TERRIBLE MOLD PROBLEM … TWICE!

During September of last year, I showed up at an 18-story office building in Corpus Christi to find one of the worst mold problems I’ve ever seen. I investigated five office suites on five different floors, and the mold was everywhere.

Eating through cubicle wall partitions.
Expanding across the backs and sides of desk chairs.
Growing on the handles of lateral filing cabinets.
Covering the jackets, dresses, and ties hanging from office coat trees.
And much more!

How did things get this bad? Well, as I learned, the building had been recently repossessed by the bank. They didn’t give the property management company much budget to work with, so when one of the building’s chillers went down, they couldn’t afford to replace it. That meant the building’s A/C was operating at half capacity. Humidity levels quickly rose to 65%–70% — 10% above the 60% standard.

The humidity truly wreaked havoc, inviting mold to grow at an incredible pace. Fortunately, very few tenants occupied the building at the time! At my recommendation, the managers launched a large mold remediation project in all five suites, wiping away mold from the semi- and non-porous items, vacuuming the soft surfaces and carpets, and running air scrubbers for two full weeks. I also recommended they fix the chiller capacity issue as soon as possible.

I thought the problem was solved. But about eight weeks ago, I got a call from the same building managers: Tenants were complaining about mold again! I came out to investigate and discovered the bank hadn’t followed my recommendation to fix their second chiller or replace it. Instead, they’d rented a truck-mounted chiller … which was too small to solve their humidity problem.

The humidity was still in the 65% range, and the mold was back! Three of the five suites needed full remediation again. The other two also contained mold, although not as much, and required detailed cleaning. At one point, I opened a cupboard above an employee’s desk and found a collection of six or seven baseball caps absolutely covered in mold. The humidity was so high that the moisture had nowhere to go, and the caps were full of skin flakes … so the mold settled in and started to eat. Yikes!

This was a frustrating sight, especially because I had just identified the issue, created a scope of work, and had the problem taken care of a few months before. I felt bad for the managers of the building — clearly the bank didn’t understand how important it was to pay for proper chiller capacity.

Fortunately, this second round of expensive bad news did the trick. The bank has now found a stand-by chiller with 320 tons of chilling capacity — more than enough to keep the entire building below 60% humidity. With the stand-by chiller in place, they now plan to rebuild the existing chillers, remediate and clean the five suites, and get the whole building back in shape.

Hopefully, the mold problem will soon be solved for good, and I won’t need to visit the office in Corpus Christi for a long, long time!