Last fall mold was detected in a faculty office in the BS building. Now, there is mold again, this time in the MS building, the SC building, and on the JKC Trenton Campus. Several professors say exposure to the mold is causing them to feel ill, and in a survey of 50 students, 30 percent reported feeling ill exclusively in the MS labs.
“We’ve had issues with mold on the floor, the ceiling, the lab cabinets,” said Professor of Biology Ellen Genovesi, who is allergic to mold and has faced a variety of symptoms including coughing, sore throat and headaches. For several weeks she wore a face mask while teaching, but has now been relocated to a different classroom.
Professor Genovesi is not the only professor reporting health issues due to mold. Physics and Chemistry Professor Michael Dorneman says he is getting headaches from working in his first floor office in the MS building.
Students are also experiencing problems, possibly due to the high percentage of students with asthma on Mercer’s campus. In two surveys of 50 students conducted last fall and this spring, 25% said they were asthmatic, more than triple the national average of 8.3% according to the National Center for Health Statistics.
Dasia Allen, a Biology major at Mercer, said, “I am a little concerned considering I do have asthma, and I’ve had a problem in the past where there was mold in my school.”
She continued, “It caused my asthma to flare up really bad- really bad wheezing, really bad breathing, and it could affect my health long-term. The fact that I don’t know about [the mold] means that I can’t seek help… I would like to know simply so that I can avoid it.”
Last year the mold problem seemed to be contained to one faculty office, BS 137.
As reported in The VOICE in December 2017, Supervising Team Leader Fred Carella told the faculty members occupying the office that the mold was due to “a leak in the HVAC system in the hall outside the double doors on the east side of the business building. To determine the cause of the leak we removed the insulation from the piping. We then repaired the piping to stop the leak from continuing.”
Director of Facilities and Safety Bryon Marshall also told those occupying BS 137 that two rounds of “Mold Zapper” were used and that the problem had been resolved, a fact that was confirmed by the company that tested for the mold- Whitman Environmental Consulting and Engineering. However, the problem recurred this year and is no longer limited to a single faculty office. Now it is classrooms like the biology labs in MS.
“We have problems with cleaning.” Professor Dorneman says, adding, “They don’t wash the floors. They don’t sweep the floors the way they used to. If this building is dirty we’re going to have mold, that’s all there is to it.”
A different reason for the mold was given by Director of Facilities and Safety Bryon Marshall in an email to faculty sent on October 9. He wrote, “This heightened and sustained humidity[sic] weather has caused a higher number of incidents of surface mold.” In the email, titled “Environmental Challenges” he explains that several things are being done to address the situation including using bleach solutions, installing dehumidification units, evaluating the HVAC systems, and improving overall housekeeping.
College President Dr. Jianping Wang says, “Within the old buildings, the problem is not going to go away with a little tweak of HVAC…Unless you tear down the whole system, you can’t fix it.”
However, Dr. Wang noted, cost is an obstacle.
“This college only receives anywhere between 2 to 3 million dollars a year to renovate this big of a campus. You can’t even touch a bathroom for less than $100,000,” she says.
She said, “Which building is falling apart will get the first makeover. The reason we want to add on to the old building is because the trick is when we add on to an old building we can also replace the old building’s HVAC system.”
Another concern that has held over since last year is the question of when and how students are notified about mold on campus. Last year students were never informed by the college about the problem.
At the time, Bryon Marshall stated in an email, “The decision to not notify the student population was made, in part, due to the identification/location of the source, the nature and extent of the biological substance/containment and relocation efforts that were undertaken to minimize exposure.”
This year students still haven’t been informed.
Dr. Wang believes it is unnecessary to panic over the type of mold present at Mercer. She said, “Most of us, fortunately, are healthy enough to say ‘Oh that mold, let me just wipe it off or clean it.”
When asked why students have not been notified, Dr. Wang responded, “We all understand young generation people don’t like to read a lot of text….When we have a very long email we don’t know how many students will be interested in reading them.”
She noted that Dean of Students Dr. Diane Campbell would be the one responsible for any mass email to students.
Dr. Campbell says, “Every day there is all kinds of stuff that goes on here, and I don’t think that students have to be informed about everything. But if there is something that comes up that could be harmful, and we found that it could be harmful, then I think that students should be informed.”
She continued, “They put dehumidifiers over there. They are doing the clean up that needed to be done. As far as I was concerned they were taking the steps to fix the situation.”
Professor Dorneman asked the administration about increasing the airflow throughout the building to help combat the issue.
He states, “They said they were going to put in dehumidifiers as a stop gap, and that’s okay, but you can’t run them in class all the time because of the noise. Noise pollution is an issue. There are state regulations about that.”
As of now, all three floors of the MS building have dehumidifiers, five being on floor two.
Dr. Wang says, “It’s the extreme weather that is causing this problem. It’s not Mercer’s problem. It’s the whole country’s problem…The ultimate goal is to combat climate change.”
Professor Dorneman says, “I want to believe them when they say they’re going to fix it.” He concluded, “I believe them when they said that in spaces they tested there were no pathogenic mold spores, I completely and entirely believe them when they said that this is a stop gap measure and we’re going to fix it. Now I want to see their plan.”
