The Austin Chronicle Politics: How Much Mold? -
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Last Visited: 2/7/2005
-- Vince Torres, Texas Institute for the Indoor Environment
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Vince Torres, assistant director of UT's Texas Institute for the Indoor Environment, knows about mold and he knows about AISD.Torres was instrumental in focusing the district's attention on the now-remediated mold problems at Hill Elementary.Most recently he served as one of the co-chairs of the district's $49.3 million health and safety bond proposal.
While generally more charitable to AISD's testing methods, Torres still finds the Maplewood results a bit puzzling."If you find [mold spores] anywhere, you need to know where it's coming from," he said."You need to know, concretely, where it is coming from so you know if it is a problem or not."And since Stachybotrys spores are heavier than your average mold spore, he said, it is likely that the Stachybotrys found on the Maplewood desk actually came from the ceiling."The first thing I would've done is look up," he said.
Torres said that a major problem with current mold tests is a failure to mention the conditions under which the tests were conducted and the protocols followed when conducting the tests -- problems he said could also result in some of the peculiarities in the Maplewood and other AISD mold test results he was shown by the Chronicle.
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Torres said one problem is that the development of testing protocols, and research on the physical effects of mold exposure, is ongoing.Further confounding the matter is that there are no state-mandated guidelines or licensing standards for mold testing.He added that there are already effective tools available for monitoring indoor air quality, such as the "Tools for Schools" program designed by the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency -- a program he said he hopes AISD will implement.
It is fair to say that a program like the "Tools for Schools" (information available online at www.epa.gov/iaq/schools/index.html) could also have helped the district identify earlier the mold problems at Hill Elementary.Hill's mold problem, which was discovered in early 2000 and eventually cost $4.6 million to fix, was not immediately obvious, Torres said.It wasn't until Torres' wife showed him a memo from Hill's principal that Torres began to suspect a problem at the elementary school, and he became actively involved in helping the district identify it.
"I got home one day and my wife said you have to read this memo," Torres recalled."And the memo went on about how the three teachers that were taken to the hospital were all fine.I said, 'Whoa, you've got a problem here.'" So Torres began to look at health complaint logs kept at Hill, "and it was clear that a pattern was emerging," he said."... teachers are dropping like flies with respiratory problems, and the school was having to call an ambulance to get oxygen into them."
Yet the physical mold infestation at Hill wasn't readily apparent.The bulk of the mold was found inside the walls, and had gotten there through roof leaks and poor drainage through the foundation.As a result, Torres said, tracking health complaints to look for possible patterns became an invaluable tool for detecting mold growth."Absolutely.If you do the Tools for Schools EPA program, they are adamant about documenting complaints and reports about construction that has been completed as a result of complaints," he said.
Although he has consulted with district officials, Torres said he has not received any documentation outlining the district's progress toward implementing any of the EPA programs.
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The test results showed viable Alternaria spores -- which, Torres said, thrive in conditions similar to those found in the human lungs -- in the classroom.The same spores were not found in the outside air sample, a situation which indoor air experts say should raise red flags.
Yet this is the same Kealing data that showed a larger number of viable spores than total spores in the overall air, a discrepancy that Torres and other indoor health experts said would make the overall data unreliable.
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Indeed, even indoor air quality experts like Torres are quick to admit that the science is still evolving.While a confirmed connection has been made between health problems and exposure to high concentrations of mold -- as with farmers who handle moldy hay -- Torres said similar conclusions have yet to be drawn for what he calls "low level, high stakes" exposure: "as in being in an office or a school and being exposed for long periods of time to lower levels of mold."Research in this area, he said, is ongoing.
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Vince Torres agrees that there may be more mold problems within the district then have currently been identified, and that digging into the bond package construction is the only way to find out."I think we've done the right thing from the standpoint that we have lots of maintenance issues that we haven't been that diligent on, and it's time to start paying the piper on that," he said.
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