QUESTIONS RAISED ON MOLD CLEANUP
PENNSBURG » About 35 people turned out Thursday to hear what cleaners, testers and the school board had to say about the mold infestation that closed Upper Perkiomen High School for the past week.
The decision to close the school was made last Saturday by Superintendent Alexis McGloin after a previous cleanup failed to prevent the mold from returning.
Classes are expected to resume again Monday, but work to remove the mold will continue for weeks after classes are completed each day.
Raymond Felix, who works for Belfor Property Restoration, the national firm hired by the school district to clean the mold for the second time, said Upper Perk’s situation is not unusual.
“You are not unique. This problem has been popping up at schools throughout Maryland, Delaware and Pennsylvania. This is the seventh school I have been in this month,” he said.
“This year we’ve had record temperatures and record humidity. We used to get heat waves that were a week or two. Now they’re a month or two. Summers are just hotter and wetter than they used to be,” Felix said. “The new normal is not a one-week heat wave — the new normal is a hot, brutal summer.”
After the cleanup began, “we kept finding more and more mold throughout the school,” Felix said.
The problem is the school building is 52 years old and its systems were built to deal with dryer summers.
“We found ducts that had been cleaned 15 to 18 years ago that were falling apart,” said Felix.
Although the HVAC filters are changed regularly, some of the cooler coils can be hard to get to, and, as a result, trap warm air instead of allowing cooler air to circulate. When his workers got to the coils, “it was like a carpet back there,” he said.
Some ducts have been replaced and a complete cleaning and reconditioning of the coils is also underway, Felix said. “And we have 126 people going through the school methodically doing a very fine mold remediation and thorough cleaning.”
After an area is considered clean, 1Source checks the job and takes air samples to make sure mold spores are less than they are outside. It is not uncommon, said Vice President Harry M. Neill, for a room to fail once it has been cleaned, but so far all the first-floor rooms cleaned at Upper Perkiomen have passed with clean air sample results.
“I think it’s going well, the good news is we found a big part of this problem and I think if we get on a regular maintenance plan, this issue will never be as big as it is right now,” Felix said.
But some residents are still worried.
Parent Alisa Capreri told the board her son has asthma and was affected by the mold when he returned to school after the summer. She is worried he will be adversely affected again when he returns Monday.
And student Raevona Fisher told the board that a photo showing mold growing on the ceiling in the band room was making the rounds among students in early August, but no one was notified.
Parent Mary Cannon from Hereford Township wanted to know why the district had not notified parents of the first mold infestation.
McGloin said it was believed to have been handled before any students returned to school, so notification was not thought to be necessary.
Felix said so far, the first floor of the high school has been cleaned and tested by a second firm, 1Source Safety and Health Inc., which found no evidence of mold. Dehumidifiers are currently running in all the classrooms to make it more difficult for the mold to grow.
No price-tag on the cleanup was offered Thursday night and McGloin said the district will first try to get an insurance company to cover it. However, insurance often won’t cover mold, she said. If so, the district has enough in its reserves to cover the cost, she said.
This article first appeared as a post in The Digital Notebook blog.