Mold Contamination and Your Home Text Size:

If your home suffers extensive water damage from severe storms, floods or hurricanes, you need to be worried about mold contamination and its related health risks. You also need to know how to prevent mold from growing and how to clean-up mold after your property has been damaged by water.

What Is Mold?

Molds and mildews are fungi and can grow anywhere indoors where there is moisture, usually from open windows, doorways, leaking roofs and gutters, foundation leaks, the intake vents of dryers and heating, ventilation and air conditioning systems, and from any materials that remain wet for 48 to 72 hours. Flooding provides an optimal opportunity for mold to grow.

The most common indoor molds are:

• Cladosporium
• Penicillium
• Aspergillus
• Altemaria
• Stachybotrys chartarum, also known as Stachybotrys atra

While molds are not toxic by themselves, certain molds are capable of producing toxins that may cause hay fever-like allergic symptoms, skin rashes and headaches. Molds can increase the health risks of people having the following symptoms:

• Chronic respiratory disease, including asthma and chronic obstructive pulmonary disorder
• Immune suppression
• Hypersensitivity pneumonitis, also known as farmer's lung, woodworker's lung and malt worker's lung

Prevention

To prevent mold from growing in your home:

• Keep the humidity level between 40% and 50%
• Use an air conditioner or a dehumidifier during humid months
• Be sure the home has adequate ventilation, including exhaust fans in kitchens and bathrooms
• Use mold inhibitors that can be added to paints
• Clean your bathrooms with mold-killing products
• Do not carpet your bathrooms
• Remove and replace flooded carpets

Clean-up

After a flood, mold will grow in your house and it may make you or your family members sick. In order to eliminate mold growth, you need to remove it from materials that can be cleaned and throw away materials that cannot be cleaned or are too physically damaged to use. In drying out and cleaning your house after a flood, you should take the following steps:

• Clean-up and dry out your house as quickly as possible. Wear protective gloves and goggles. Open doors and windows, use fans and dehumidifiers and use commercial products or a mixture of one cup of bleach to one gallon of water to dry all hard surfaces and items, including appliances, tools and toys
• Remove (but store for insurance purposes) all porous items (carpets, upholstery, wallpaper, drywall, ceiling tiles, insulation, some clothes, leather, paper, wood products and food) that have been wet for more than 48 hours and cannot be cleaned and dried
• Eliminate or limit the sources of water and moisture
• Remove any damaged or contaminated items or materials
• Clean and dry all wet materials

Wash all laundry, linen and stuffed animals in safe hot water and a disinfectant or sanitizer. Make sure your washing machine is safe to use and run it without laundry for one cycle using hot water, detergent and a disinfectant. Using bleach on your clothes will remove mold and mildew but will fade some fabrics. For clothes requiring dry cleaning, shake out the mud and take it to a professional dry cleaner.

In cleaning dishes, plates, flatware, glass items, plastics should be hand washed in a disinfectant and air-dried. You may use your dishwasher if it is safe, cleaned and dried, but run it unloaded for a cycle with a disinfectant

Make sure your "heating, ventilating and air conditioning" (HVAC) system is cleaned, dried, disinfected and inspected before you use it. Moisture can collect and dissipate to areas of the HVAC system that were not submerged.

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