Mold Growth – Commercial Office Buildings
Some more exciting commercial mold inspections have included multi-storey multi-tenanted buildings. There are issues that can be difficult to pin point without intrusive investigation and the most sophisticated hand held tools such as thermal imaging becomes heavily relied on. Exterior pre-fab finishes and stucco finishes can cause moisture intrusion in cryptic seams or crevices making mold detection difficult without proper equipment.
As evidenced in the examples above, moisture can become trapped behind the cladding which can be detrimental from an indoor mold perspective. Also as illustrated, this type of construction has been adopted to residential applications both historically and in some capacities with different technology is today’s “new builds”.
Mold Growth – Retail Buildings
Environmental Services Group was hired by a property manager for a retail plaza. In this instance a bank’s utility room housing a leaking hot water tank backed onto a fast food chain’s set of bathrooms. Both bathrooms were also slowly leaking at plumbing inside the wall cavities.
Mold impacted drywall was removed inside a containment while still maintaining the bank’s security and providing bathroom facilities to the patron’s of the restaurant. An insurance claim was not made by either tenant as plumbing repair was part of the property management’s responsibility.
Mold Growth – Newly Built Homes
Environmental Services Group was called out to a set of 5 residential lots where houses were partially built and then abandoned by the original builder. ESG was able to work with the new builder and the municipality to determine what remedial efforts would be required to each structure so that the final construction could be completed.
Eight lots in total were abandoned. Three lots were completely torn down to concrete foundation as wood members were too affected by mold and moisture.
The remaining five lots were restored using a combination of dry-ice blasting, surface cleaning, anti-microbials and HEPA vacuuming. All cleaning stages were documented. Final swab surface sampling of the wood structures were sent to a laboratory for mold analysis. A verification report was generated for each structure and provided to the builder and the municipality. The municipality was satisfied with the mold cleanup efforts and the documentation provided by ESG and gave the builder authorization to proceed with construction.