Originally ran in California Job Journal, April 9, 2000.
by Kathy Masera, publisher
California Job Journal
FROM PART I: A broken water pipe flooded a portion of California Job Journal's offices on the Friday after Thanksgiving, but our landlord - Pacific Gulf Properties - delayed cleanup of the soaked carpeting for several days. A moldy odor shortly thereafter was our first warning of impending disaster.Staff members soon began reporting an unusual number of allergic reactions and ailments. At first we assumed it was just the flu, but when the symptoms started to include spontaneous nosebleeds, publisher Kathy Masera called in an environmental scientist to test our surroundings. What he discovered were mold concentrations in the carpeting and spore counts in the air so alarming that we were advised to evacuate immediately. An invisible army of toxic microorganisms had so permeated the premises that nothing could be removed without first undergoing extensive decontamination.
Before entering our mold-contaminated office on the morning of New Year's Eve, I vowed to remain calm in the face of chaos. I knew my resolve would be vital to surviving the ordeal ahead.
Our relocation team faced a monumental task - to perform an emergency triage of all our equipment and files, paring them down to the bare essentials needed to run our 30-person publishing business for three or four weeks out of a temporary location, little more than half the size of our current office. And to complete the entire move in two days while working under conditions hazardous to our health.
It was overwhelming. Like spring cleaning gone amuck. House cleaning times 10,000. Managers in every department - advertising, accounting, editorial, career services, production, and computer services - diligently began the daunting task of sorting, saving or discarding every item in our 6500 square-foot office. Items we didn't trash would either go into storage or be marked for immediate decontamination.
While things were chaotic, the office didn't take on a twilight zone quality until the SpaceCon crew arrived.
At first, the workers from SpaceCon, a Sacramento firm that specializes in decontaminating environmental hazards, looked like the rest of us. Wearing street clothes, the team showed up mid-morning and began to scout the best location to build their decontamination chamber.
They settled on the conference room, which they began to empty and sterilize. Draping semi-transparent plastic across the ceiling, walls, and over the floor, they created a large rectangular bubble, which was divided into three plastic chambers. Every exposed surface of the plastic was then wiped down with a fungicide. The whole process would take most of the day.
The conference room had doorways at each end and the plastic sheeting was used to create a kind of air lock at both entrances. Our contaminated stuff would be fed in through one portal and the cleaned items would come out the other.
When the SpaceCon crew was ready to begin the arduous task of sanitizing everything, they donned white spacesuit-like HazMat outfits complete with helmets and gloves. After each item was brought through chamber one, it was wiped with a fungicide, HEPA vacuumed, and wiped again in chamber two before emerging from the chamber-three "air lock" for inspection and approval by the environmental scientist. Anything that didn't pass muster had to go back through the process a second time before transport to the new office.
Until then, I'd had no idea what the scientists meant when they talked about creating a decontamination chamber. To me, it all seemed surreal, like a scene from the movie ET, when government scientists bubbled the house to capture the alien.
Watching SpaceCon build their bubble burst any illusions I'd had about our predicament. They were wearing HazMat outfits, while we worked in direct contact with everything contaminated. The crew rarely handled anything without gloves, and often preferred to use tongs. Even Mark Pheatt, the environmental scientist who had advised us to evacuate, seemed more cautious, breaking out a full-blown gas mask, while we could only don those little white masks that hardware stores sell to do-it-yourselfers seeking relief from sawdust or paint fumes.
Despite our growing unease, we continued to labor as if quarantined, dutifully lining up a seemingly endless array of items to be cleaned - computers, printers, paste-up boards, reference books, phones, files - everything we'd need to jump start the business in our new, clean quarters.
Some things, however, were goners.
"Wouldn't it be nice to take some of the plants to our temporary office?" someone suggested.
"You aren't taking any," Mark insisted. "They should all be destroyed." The soil and roots were magnets for contaminating microbes and could not be saved.
Not that I cared. Most of our foilage had been looking sickly for some time. A seven-foot ficus tree in our reception area had been losing so many leaves, it now looked more like Charlie Brown's forlorn Christmas tree. As for the rest of our plants, I noted they had been withering for awhile now.
"That's because they've been poisoned by the mold," Mark said.
Then it hit me. For the past month, our plants had been dying mysteriously. No matter what we did, nothing helped.
"You mean that's what's been happening to us?" I asked.
Confirming my fear, Mark explained that the mycotoxins emitted by the warring mold colonies in our office were choking the plants to death.
I went to examine a collection of plants lining the wall of our break room. All were indeed turning a deathly yellow. It was one thing to talk about potential health hazards in our contaminated office, another to see these plants withering on death row. Like canaries in a coal mine, the plants' plight should have alerted us to our ailing environment. Had we only understood the warning signs.
Some of our office equipment had fallen victim as well, said Mark, leading the way to our mailroom, where he showed me how the mold had invaded our mailing machine.
Thirsty spores had wedged their way into the flap licker's water reservoir. From there, the mold spread to internal mechanisms. We had not realized it at the time, but each piece of mail we sent out in December had secret little envoys aboard, thankfully at a level too minuscule to do any harm.
Other items were not as costly to dump, but were in some ways more distressing. To speed the evacuation, we needed to discard as many paper products as possible - a real challenge for a paper-intensive business like publishing. It was necessary because the spores feed off the cellulose in paper. No need to clean what we could discard.
Being a thrifty person, I tried to rescue as much as possible. In the lunch room, I retrieved open items like salt, pepper, sugar, creamer, paper plates, etc., putting them in the to-be-saved box. Yet whenever I returned to the lunchroom, I would find the items in the pile to be destroyed. By the third go-round, I voiced my frustration:
"Who keeps taking this stuff out of the box to be saved?"
"You can't save anything that's been opened," explained a SpaceCon worker, especially the paper plates, a cellulose-rich dish for mold to feast on. Yuck. Anyone who had used those plates in the past month probably had their food peppered with toxic spores.
Was no corner clean in our once well-kempt workplace?
It was clear that our allergy-like symptoms were becoming more pronounced by the hour. Moving all our furniture and files around only made matters worse, stirring up the spores to dizzying levels. It was a losing proposition - the faster we worked, the sicker we became. Nausea, nosebleeds, headaches, sore throats, sneezing, and intestinal distress were growing more severe as our lungs struggled with the toxic-laden air. We didn't know it yet, but many of us were developing sinus, ear and lung infections.
Despite a seemingly endless task, I had already determined that we should quit work at 4:30 that afternoon - allowing our staff enough time to clean themselves up for whatever millennium celebrations they had planned. Assuming they were well enough.
By now, everyone was feeling ill from the day-long exposure. My lungs ached, my skin was burning, and I'd already suffered two nosebleeds that day. Time to leave.
Everyone would be off New Year's Day, but come Sunday, January 2, we'd resume the marathon clean-up and move. Our ailing, weary staff would get all of one day to recuperate.
On Sunday, when one of the technicians arrived to help install our phone and computer cabling, he was greeted by my husband Clayton, the mastermind of the move. While his title is executive editor, Clayton is a true Renaissance man - our jack of all trades who at times has functioned as computer systems expert, operations manager and telecommunications engineer. Whether it's some phrasing or a fax machine that needs a fix, Clayton is our go-to guy.
We relied on him to handle the logistics of equipping and moving us to our new, cramped quarters. In addition to the space planning, that meant arranging for phone service, furniture rental, computer networking and utilities on a moment's notice. On the last two days of the year, he worked 44 hours straight, without complaint.
So Clayton had little time to fret about health issues.
But that morning, the sight of our relocation team wearing surgical-style masks had the phone technician understandably disconcerted.
"Don't worry, you won't have to enter the contaminated building," Clayton told him. "But even if you did, since you're not sensitized to the mold, it's not something you would really have to worry about. Not everyone has a strong reaction," Clayton said reassuringly.
His comments might have been more convincing had the technician, at that moment, not noticed blood starting to drip from Clayton's nose.
Mister Stoic was suddenly confronted with his first spontaneous nosebleed since this saga began. Until that moment, despite the havoc the toxic mold had created in his life, Clayton had been downplaying the invisible threat. Not even when it became clear that toxic mold had probably caused his unusually persistent three-week illness in December, would Clayton concede he too had been a victim. Now, the sight of his own blood finally brought an end to his denial.
He recounted the bizarre incident to us later that day, and between sneezes and coughs we all laughed at his gallows humor.
But if there was one person who saw little humor in the story, it was our scientist. When he went home on New Year's Eve, Mark suffered the first nosebleed in his 30-year career after failing to don his gas mask before retrieving a few insulation samples from above the ceiling tiles, where the mold infestation was particularly bad.
Even though he had authored the report that prompted our evacuation, I don't think Mark really experienced first-hand how bad the contamination was until he suffered that nosebleed himself. He talked incessantly about it on Sunday through the gas mask he now refused to take off.
By Sunday night, the staff had hauled out a half-dozen industrial-size trash bins full of contaminated garbage. But while we had made great progress, it was clear the frustratingly slow pace of the decontamination would delay completion of the move until Monday.
It was also obvious that our "rent-ready" facility wasn't. For starters, it already had a tenant of sorts - a big black-widow spider nestled in a huge web welcomed us to the lunchroom. We were also thrilled to discover a busted pipe under the kitchen sink. This whole sad saga began with a broken water pipe that was the catalyst for our mold-induced evacuation. This time, however, the property manager responded quickly.
Still, there were other aggravations. Power wasn't hooked up to a number of essential outlets. The heating and air conditioning were out in the front half of the building. And, to add insult to injury, one unhappy worker discovered at an inopportune moment that this facility's bathrooms came without toilet paper.
Of course, the new office had one big attraction. No mold. Our environmental scientist had tested air samples before we moved in to make sure.
Despite all the complications, we were actually conducting some business by Monday afternoon, even though a bunch of our equipment was still working its way through detox. The SpaceCon crew had whittled the job down to the less essential items, some of which proved quite challenging to clean.
Our refrigerator was "glued" to the kitchen floor. Mold two inches thick had formed around the evaporation pan, affixing it to the linoleum. Only by ripping the sheet flooring could the fridge be carted into the decontamination chamber, where the crew spent hours scrubbing the unit.
When we finally hooked up the refrigerator in our new break room, the electrical circuits couldn't handle the load. If anyone tried to use the microwave, it blew out the power to our network servers, creating havoc with our bootstrapped computer operations.
Unplug the microwave, suggested the landlord, to which we responded, "Send an electrician," which they finally did.
By Monday evening, things were still chaotic. I was being mobbed in our reception area by seven people vying for my attention. Two SpaceCon workers wanted to know where to leave a dolly of decontaminated equipment. One employee was already distressed about her shrunken and no-longer-private workspace. Others were still trying to get settled in, and some were actually tackling the business of our business.
At least with the mold behind us, we could start getting back to some semblance of normal operations. Were we finally beginning to see a light at the end of the tunnel? I thought so.
How wrong I was.
Sidebar - Working on the Front Lines of an Office Infestation
Part III - Battling Bigger Varmints
Return to California Job Journal's Mold Information Home Page
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