To many people in New Orleans, mold is a fact of life.
It doesn’t take much to create a ripe environment for mold to not only grow but to take over an entire room or building. All it needs is a little bit of water and a little humidity.
Apparently that combination was just right this summer in the Wolf Den, across the hall from the Underground, in the Danna Center. It invaded sometime between the last day of summer camp, held partly in the Wolf Den, and Jessica Mueller’s first day as Christian Life Community Director.
Mueller, whose office is in the Wolf Den, said, “I arrived in New Orleans, but I hadn’t come to work yet and (Dean of University Ministry) Kurt Bindewald said, ‘If you have to go to your office, and there’s people working there, it’s because there’s mold there. I’m really sorry, but we’re getting it all cleaned up.'”
That was just the beginning. A week later, Mueller found that the mold had returned in her office on the carpet and had spread to other rooms. “We were walking through the doors into the Wolf Den, and for some reason, I just looked down at one of the couches, and I said, ‘Wait, is that mold too?'”
It was, and it was all over the Wolf Den – on the carpet, the couches and in all of the rooms adjoining it, including the LUCAP offices, the Panhellenic offices and the conference room.
“We turned on the lights, and it was just all around,” Mueller said. “We called Physical Plant, and they came, and we went into the Panhellenic office, and that was really bad. It was probably the worst, and the conference room looked fine, but when you walked in and looked at the tables, there was mold in all the creases.”
Ann Moss, assistant director of operations for Physical Plant, said, “We were told that we had a problem, and we went to look, and we found out … that the AC wasn’t working properly.”
Since the space hadn’t been occupied in a while, nobody had noticed the growing problem.
Physical Plant brought in Nationwide Restoration, a company that restores areas damaged by mold or fire by wiping down all hard surfaces with microbial cleansers that stop mold growth. All affected upholstered furniture was just thrown out, Moss added.
Later that week, Mueller found Dumpster divers pulling out the moldy furniture from a Dumpster behind Carrollton Hall.
“It was fuzzy gray mold, and you could only see it in a certain light, so when I came out of Carrollton and saw people taking the moldy furniture out of the Dumpster I said, ‘Um, you might not want to do that,'” Mueller said. “They were very appreciative.”
Moss said the Wolf Den is now mold-free and completely safe to work in, but she cautions that mold could return anywhere if the conditions are right.
“This can happen over a weekend. It doesn’t take long at all for mold to grow. You get the perfect conditions … in the basement of that building, with the air conditioning off and air coming in there from the hall. You get condensation, you get drip – you have a rainforest basically,” Moss said.
Jordan Hultine can be reached at [email protected].
