Originally ran in California Job Journal, April 2, 2000.
by Kathy Masera, publisher
California Job Journal
EDITOR'S NOTE: On Dec. 28, 1999, California Job Journal publisher Kathy Masera was advised to evacuate her Sacramento office in order to protect herself and her employees from the serious health hazards posed by toxic mold. In this first of a three-part series, Masera tells her cautionary tale about a little-known, unregulated workplace hazard. It is a story of how easily dormant organisms in our world can erupt into an environmental emergency. This is her chronicle of how she and her staff have struggled to maintain their business and their health against a microscopic menace that threatened to overwhelm their lives and their livelihoods.
Heidi, our new office manager, is the picture of health and vitality. So I thought it curious to learn that she had suffered a serious nosebleed in early December - her first day on the job.
I would have dismissed the incident as an anomaly had it been the only nosebleed that month or even that week. But I soon learned that Heidi was the third employee to suffer a nosebleed that day.
Common sense told me that adults do not suffer spontaneous nosebleeds for no apparent reason. Yet in recent weeks several employees, including myself, had been afflicted with nosebleeds accompanied by a variety of cold and flu-like symptoms - from debilitating headaches to intestinal distress. Everyone assumed it was just some persistent seasonal illness making its way around the office.
But even winter colds go away eventually. Why was no one getting better? What was making us all sick?
If our office was the culprit, I suspected it had something to do with the restroom water pipe that had broken over Thanksgiving weekend. Our offices were closed, but one employee who came in to work that Friday discovered the restroom and adjacent office area flooded. He immediately contacted my husband at home, who then called our landlord - Pacific Gulf Properties - to request that they send someone over to the building to assess the damage.
Reciting a litany of excuses (don't forget it was the day after Thanksgiving), the property manager refused to send anyone to investigate, so my husband and I rushed over to the building to check it out for ourselves. What we found was far worse than expected - about 300 square feet of carpeting was under water. We again called the property manager expecting that once she understood the magnitude of the problem, help would be on the way. But no. Despite our strenuous objections, she was not about to pay holiday wages for some on-call cleanup crew. Our problem would have to soak awhile. It was noon on Monday before anyone arrived to begin drying out the place.
Within a week, the carpeting outside the restroom began emitting a foul odor, a smell very similar to something going bad in your refrigerator. The stench inside the bathroom was overpowering and seemed to grow by the day. Rather than make it better, disinfectants and deodorizers just seemed to add another layer to the pungent aroma. And people working in the immediate vicinity began to notice their allergies acting up.
We contacted Pacific Gulf Properties to urge that they hire an environmental specialist to evaluate our situation. The landlord, however, insisted on only sending over a carpet guy to check things out. What does a carpet guy know about sick buildings? We picked up the phone book and began our own search for an environmental scientist.
Soon, we connected with Mark Pheatt, a highly respected industrial hygienist with Atlantic Pacific Environmental. He's been investigating bacterial threats in the workplace for almost 30 years, and chasing mold-related problems around Sacramento for the last decade.
His approach was meticulous and methodical. While he noted and documented the office-wide sickness, his initial examination revealed nothing out of the ordinary other than a stained carpet. There was nothing visible to the naked eye - no mold like you'd see on an old piece of bread.
Still, he explained, that proved nothing. Everything would hinge on a laboratory analysis of the air we were breathing and swabs from various surfaces around our 6500 square-foot office. He immediately set up exotic-looking air samplers and took swipes of the carpets, walls, and acoustical panels. The specimens were sent off to an Arizona lab, where cultures would take seven to 14 days to grow and be identified.
While we awaited the test results, the office environment continued to deteriorate. Now whenever I entered the affected restroom, my skin and eyes would burn, and I'd sneeze and cough for at least 15 minutes. I was more sure than ever we had a toxic problem, and that this bathroom was ground zero. Just to be safe, we put an Out of Order sign on the restroom door. Still, more people were calling in sick by the day. Eventually all but four co-workers out of 30 would report ill effects. My health was among the worst. I was battling an ear infection, and what I thought was a sinus infection had created lacerations inside my nose and mouth. Like many of my employees, I suffered headaches, prolonged coughing fits, fever and other symptoms normally associated with the flu.
In a few days, we got preliminary lab results on the air samples, which were alarming enough for me to call an emergency staff meeting.
We did indeed have an infected building, I told the staff. Although we would not know the full extent of the problem until the surface swabs were cultured, we knew that the concentration of mold spores in the office air was 800 times greater than outside. Two areas - including the space that had been flooded in front of Heidi's desk (just outside my office) - were particular hot spots.
Just the night before, I had seen a TV news report about an exotic pet shop in Turlock where all the animals had died from prolonged exposure to the same types of mold we were breathing. I pointed out to the staff that thankfully, as the pet shop owners had learned, our human immune system was much more resilient than that of reptiles and birds, the pet shop casualties.
Following Mark's advice, we brought in four huge industrial-strength air scrubbers equipped with HEPA filters capable of trapping some of the airborne attackers. Roaring like jet engines, these giant air purifiers processed all the air in our office every few hours. The only other thing we could do was wait for the lab results to determine how severe our predicament was. I for one was hoping that the problem could be eliminated by simply isolating and decontaminating the problem bathroom. As we would soon learn, I was staggeringly off the mark.
On Dec. 28, the final report from Atlantic Pacific Environmental arrived. Mark minced no words. Our office space was infected with mycotoxin-spewing molds, some of which were present at 2200 times the levels found in the air outside. While half a dozen varieties of mold were found in the carpet, walls and acoustical panels, he was extremely concerned about the proliferation of three: penicillium, aspergillus, and its particularly nasty cousin, aspergillus niger.
For only the second time in 20 years, Mark was telling a client to flee their facility.
"CJJ staff should vacate the building as soon as possible," his report stressed. "Relocation to a clean building, including clean furniture, should be considered."
"Hard goods, specifically computers and fax machines, can be removed from the site providing that they are decontaminated prior to leaving the site." Mark recommended establishing a three-stage decontamination facility where items would be wiped with a fungicide, HEPA vacuumed, and then wiped again.
We had been attempting for several days to meet with Pacific Gulf Properties, but they seemed reticent to acknowledge our problem. Finally, a meeting had been scheduled. Coincidentally, it would occur one hour after Mark issued his evacuation order.
The regional manager brought his own environmental scientist to the meeting to provide an independent evaluation of the lab results. As we gathered around the table in our contaminated conference room, all eyes focused on the landlord's scientist in hopes he would offer a more reasonable solution. Maybe we could cordon off a portion of the building, cleaning up one part while working in the other.
"Don't you think evacuation is an overreaction?" the district manager asked his specialist. The expert's answer brought a hush to the room.
"I have to concur with Mark. The elevated contamination levels of these molds are in the upper tenth percentile of the worst I have ever seen."
Everyone's eyes dropped. After a pregnant pause, the scientists began to explain in detail what had happened.
When the pipe broke that Thanksgiving weekend, the standing water allowed dormant molds to multiply out of control. Our closed office, with its history of chronic roof leaks, had become the perfect incubator for a runaway infestation. The mold sprang to life and began to gorge on cellulose in the acoustical paneling, the carpet and interior walls. As a byproduct of the digestion, toxic spores were emitted into the air. The bathroom was particularly hard hit because the water had over 72 hours to soak into the sheetrock walls, another fertile breeding ground for fungi.
In fact, the mold colonies had become so strong in some areas that they were waging a war against each other. The scientists were particularly fascinated to find a 4 inch by 10 foot length of carpet that was free of infestation, yet was teeming with life on either side. It was a completely sterile area, a textbook case that neither scientist have ever seen before first-hand - a naturally occurring demilitarized zone between the aspergillus niger and the penicillium, opposing forces trying to kill each other off by emitting dangerous mycotoxins which in turn assaulted our respiratory systems.
As bizarre as it sounds, we humans were the unintended victims, casualties of a microscopic battle we could not see, refugees of a war between the amassed microbes.
The startling realization made me feel like a lab rat caught in some experiment gone horribly wrong.
Worse, the spores were so pervasive that every office item - from paper clips to posters - would have to be decontaminated or destroyed. It made me think back to when I was sick as a child, and my mother would insist on washing my bed clothes every day. Now, we faced the prospect of trying to wash an entire office. Even employees' clothing would have to be laundered or dry-cleaned - anything that had come in contact with our office was suspect.
Oh my God, I thought. How can we get healthy much less run a business after such an exposure? Both scientists reassured me that the symptoms would most likely subside as soon as people were no longer exposed to the toxins. They estimated it would take days or weeks for young, resilient staff members to shake off the toxic effects, and maybe months for some older workers, especially those like me who have a history of respiratory problems.
And where would we go? Fortunately, there was a vacant office in the building next door, but it was barely more than half the size of our existing space. We couldn't possibly squeeze everybody in. Those who could work from home would have to. In the span of three days we were going to try and decontaminate everything, pack up, move out, and relocate 30 people into an office for which we didn't yet have a floor plan in place, much less a number of other "minor details" like the wiring for our telephone and computer networks.
We then learned that all of our chairs were contaminated and would have to be destroyed. The fabric and cellulose inside the cushions offered another ideal habitat that was nearly impossible to clean effectively. The same was true for the countless acoustical panels that served as workspace dividers. Any furniture we needed would have to be rented.
The regional manager for Pacific Gulf Properties tried to be reassuring. "Kathy, I don't want you to worry. We will make everything right. We will cover all the expenses and help you get through this."
Still, we faced a monumental task.
First, we delivered the news to the staff. Time to abandon ship. Take nothing home except personal items of sentimental value, and bring nothing back that has not been cleaned with a fungicide or washed thoroughly, including clothing. Even their shoes had to be taken outside and slapped together to rid them of unseen hitchhikers. Although the employees' clothing and personal effects carried mostly dead spore proteins, the staff had become so sensitized that even these remnants could potentially prolong the time it would take for them to get well.
Everyone started packing the things they would need to work out of temporary quarters for a month or so. Only the most essential items could be taken due to the cramped conditions awaiting us and the extensive time required to get everything decontaminated. As a weekly newspaper, we had never missed a deadline and we were not about to skip the upcoming issue without a fight. We had to work fast and travel light. "Pretend you're going on a camping trip," I encouraged the staff.
While most employees went home on Thursday, Dec. 29 for some R&R over the long holiday weekend, the management staff was asked to cancel their plans for the day of New Year's eve. We'd need all hands to finish packing up and to direct the decontamination of essential office equipment and vital files.
I felt awful, and not just physically. I hated the thought of intruding on my management team's personal plans. Yet there was no alternative. Our very jobs depended upon everyone's help.
My husband and I had been looking forward to a very special New Year's Eve weekend - toasting the new millennium with close friends at a great little spot on Bodega Bay. Now, plans we'd made nearly a year ago were out the window. While the rest of the world fretted about the phantoms of Y2K, we would be battling bugs that were all too real.
It would be a New Year's none of us would soon forget.
Part II - Decontamination Daze
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