Amidst changing weather patterns and modern construction practices, mold poses a growing threat to health, emitting biotoxins that contaminate structures and work their way through your home.
Understanding Mold and Your Environment
Mold is extremely harmful to humans. This is because mold produces biotoxins which contaminate the structure, even if the mold isn’t clearly visible. Unfortunately, all it takes for mold to invade a structure is moisture—because the building materials provide all the food it needs to grow.
Mold will be an increasingly severe issue for people across the world. Weather patterns throughout Earth are changing and becoming less predictable, which means larger rainstorms, hurricanes, and floods are occurring. As we have seen this year, even historically dry regions such as Colorado and Nevada are not immune to the effects of heavy rain and flooding.
A large reason for mold growth is that modern structures are designed to be energy efficient, which means homes and other buildings are much tighter and closely sealed than they used to be. This helps us save substantial money on energy costs because air can’t escape, but it drastically prevents natural air flow and reduces the drying potential of a structure after water damage occurs. Construction professionals utilize materials such as drywall, which is much more prone to growing mold versus materials such as brick or stone.
While there are many benefits to modern construction (such as cheaper materials and faster build times), this unfortunately means that there is little room for failure when it comes to water damage. In just 24-48 hours you can see mold growing on water damaged materials.
Pure Restore is Working with Doctors to assist their Patients
We are advancing as a company and Pure Restore is collaborating with doctors who specialize in patients that are affected by mold. There are many chronic and acute symptoms that are associated with mold/biotoxin illness, including but not limited to: fatigue, weakness, aches, headaches, migraines, skin sensitivity, tremors, vertigo and more.
When a doctor encounters a patient who is possibly suffering from mold symptoms, they are going to ask questions to properly identify the condition. If mold symptoms seem likely in the patient, the doctor will refer the patient to a mold testing company. If the testing company confirms the presence of mold, they are going to call Pure Restore to safely remove the mold from the structure.
Why Remediating Mold is Challenging for Sensitive Groups
Sensitive individuals suffer the most from toxic mold, which makes remediation difficult. When mold is disturbed, it releases additional spores in an effort to survive. Mold acts like a colony that gets more aggressive when a threat is nearby. This is why attempting to remediate mold without professionals is dangerous, because you can cause more damage if you don’t complete the work properly.
If the project is not completed meticulously, it can cause harm to the patient who is already highly sensitive. This is why an extraordinary amount of effort goes into performing services for these individuals. Some patients will suffer symptoms from mold after hours, but others may take days, weeks, months, and even years—which makes this area of study highly complex and individualized for all patients. Symptoms can affect children, adults, and the elderly.
Fortunately, Pure Restore has multiple certifications which helps us understand the mold remediation process:
IICRC S520 – This is considered the core standard of mold remediation
NORMI NCMP – Certified Microbial Professional
NORMI NCRSI – Certified Remediator for Sensitized Individuals
Why Remediating Mold is Challenging
There are a few components to performing a proper remediation project:
1. Personal Protective Equipment (PPE) helps protect both employees and the patient. Employees wear PPE to avoid contamination during mold removal. This also helps us prevent cross-contamination for the patient, because the mold is not traveling on our bodies—instead, any mold particulates on the Tyvek suit will be eliminated at the same time that the suit is disposed of.
2. Containment is essential to isolating the affected workspace. If we do no
t contain an area before removing mold, we risk contaminating the entire structure. Remember, mold likes to spread when it has been disturbed, so we need to prevent the mold from contaminating unaffected areas of the structure.
3. Negative Air is how we control the air within containment. This helps us clean the air while also directing the air movement in a strategic way (typically the air movement is directed out of a window). Controlling the air within a containment setup helps us avoid floating mold spores and debris which are caused by demolition.
4. Demolition is naturally a highly destructive task, which is why disturbing mold is a concern. Remember, if we perform demolition with the right protection and containment setup, it is possible to prevent the mold from spreading further throughout the structure.
When it comes to remediating mold, the most affective way to perform the job is to contain the affected area before removing affected materials. Attempts to encapsulate or building on top of the mold will not solve the problem.
It is also important to understand that mold remediation is done to standard, but there are no local or federal regulations on the removal of mold. This could change in the future as government agencies start to better understand the threat that improper remediation poses on sensitive individuals.
How can you find the source for mold if you can’t see mold?
Many times, people will feel toxic mold symptoms before they even know there is a mold problem in their home or structure. This has given mold the reputation of creating “mystery illness” because individuals’ health are suffering, but there is no obvious indication why.
If mold is growing somewhere, that means a leak or some kind of water intrusion (such as seepage) is occurring. This could be due to poorly managed roofs, basements or crawlspaces. It very common to see water intrusion due to plumbing or appliance failures. There are many tools that can be used to detect moisture when mold is difficult to find, including moisture readers, FLIR cameras, and there are even companies that are specialized in detecting leaks.
Unfortunately, mold is commonly excluded from home insurance policies which means all incurred expenses will be paid directly by the homeowner. Insurance companies consider mold a “secondary damage” caused by water intrusion, which gives them an easy way to avoid paying those claims, even though they are related to water damage.
Extremely Harmful or Deadly Mold Genus
There are five particularly harmful or deadly mold genus that no one should expose themselves to: Stachybotrys (the famous “black mold”), Fusarium, Trichoderma, Memnoniella, and Chaetomium.
As a restoration company, there are dozens or more mold genus we see daily. Some are less harmful to humans, but ultimately there is no mold that is safe for humans. Genus such as penicillium, Cladosporium, and aspergillus are commonly seen during the mold testing process.
For clarity, Pure Restore is not a mold testing company. When it comes to assisting patients, our objective is to safely remove mold. There are other 3rd party companies who perform mold testing.
It is important to note that Pure Restore can only perform remediation for the owners of a home or structure. We cannot perform services for renters or tenants, unless they have explicit permission provided by the owner or property manager of the building the occupy.
Customers should always feel welcome to call the main office line for information! We highly encourage individuals to ask questions so that we can provide as much assistance as possible.
