Dangerous to your health and destructive to your belongings, mold spores are always in the air and summer can provide them with the right conditions to grow, especially if you do not have an air conditioner in your building. When it comes to this destructive fungal force, prevention is as important as its treatment, if not more.
Mold Prevention
If you do not have an air conditioner in your home, regularly clean areas that experience humidity or condensation with a cleanser that contains bleach. Such areas include toilets and the floor around them, under sinks, around exposed pipes and windowsills.
Use a fan to circulate the air in the room so hot air does not stay trapped by your ceiling.
If an area of your building gets wet, use fans and dehumidifiers to dry it out immediately. If you experience severe water damage, call a restoration specialist.
Keep everything dry. Because mold thrives in moist conditions, eliminating them can keep mold at bay.
Damaged roofs and leaky pipes can also lead to mold damage, so if it becomes a recurring problem, have your home inspected by a professional.
Thriving on matter that is moist, dead or decaying, mold can quickly turn a slightlywet document into an unsightly object thst you would not let your children approach. Mold is not an animal or a plant; it comes from the diverse and hearty fungi kingdom. In nature, mold is like a natural recycling system that helps break down decomposing organic matter like fallen leaves and timber. This zombie-like recycler, however, can do the same to your home and office when there is the slightest hint of moisture.
The Unwanted Guest
Invisible to the human eye, mold spores quickly travel through the air in hopes of finding moist or wet areas to call home and spread. You generally cannot see most molds until they begins to grow. With regular cleaning and sanitizing efforts, you can keep mold at bay around your windows and parts of a building that experience more moisture, like bathrooms or basements. An unexpected leak, burst pipe or a flood, however, can give mold the opportunity to run rampant throughout a building and destroy everything in its path, which could include your health if it produces mycotoxins.
When you experience water damage of any kind, take measures to dry out anything that got wet quickly and safely. If important documents, books or photographs experienced water damage, particularly if you run a business, it is best to call a document recovery specialist who can use the latest technologies to restore water-damaged items. Such items can include water-damaged blueprints, x-rays and large amounts of documents.
The first 48 to 72 hours after water or humidity damage occurs are the most crucial in salvaging the affected items. Talk to a disaster recovery specialist to learn about ways to prevent water and mold damage, as well as ways to take appropriate action after damage has occurred.
When the rains clear and you do the regular inspections and maintenance on your business, the last thing you want to find are several pools of water in your crawl space or around your foundation, rot or black mold on the floor and wet documents. Your may want to immediately replace your flooring, but what you must do first is address your drainage problem or you will have repeat water damage problems.
Building Inspections
If your building has a crawl space, inspect it at least twice a year for water entry, flooding or decay. It is also a good idea to have a pest control service inspect the building for signs of critters that can cause structural damage.
Gutter Placement
While conducting a building inspection, make sure the gutters remain directed at least six feet away from the foundation. However, if you have a sloping yard or the business is on a hillside, you may need to extend the gutter drain further. While a runoff drains in the ground may not be your ideal business accessory, you may need to install them just under the surface of the building’s landscaping to prevent pooling. Burying a French drain around the perimeter of your building’s foundation down to the footing is an effective and discrete way to prevent water damage, rot and mold.
Landscaping
Your business’ landscaping may also be to blame for bad drainage. Yards that slope towards a building, mulch, loose rocks, weeds and topsoil near a foundation can direct runoff water and rain towards that area with the help of gravity. If this is a problem you encounter, consider using a heavy clay soil that you compact and slope as your first layer of landscaping can help prevent water from traveling towards your business. Additionally, make sure that concrete walkways, patios and driveways, as well as those made from pavers, slope to ensure proper drainage.
Sump Pumps
If your business is too low for a gravity-drained system to draw water away from the building, you may need to install an exterior sump pump. This will help raise and direct the water to a location where gravity will help drain the water away and prevent flooding.
June 4, 2011 was a devastating morning for buildings surrounding a vacant building at 816 Washington Avenue in Brooklyn, New York. Over 100 firefighters fought a four-alarm fire that sent six to the hospital and torched neighboring businesses. Of the Prospect Heights businesses affected by the fire, two include a coffee shop and a cell phone retailer.
The Coffee Shop
Struggling to make ends meet, the young owner of the coffee shop thought she could save some money by not paying her commercial insurance bills. She discussed this option with her parents, from whom she sought advice, and they convinced her that this was a bad idea. She took their advice and paid the bills. While the damage to the coffee shop seemed minimal, the expenses to replace the windows the firefighters broke, the water damage clean up and the smoke damage and recoverycould have easily tanked this business if the owner did not have the proper insurance coverage to pay for the restoration services.
The Cell Phone Retailer
While it had the proper insurance coverage, the cell phone retail store suffered a massive amount of water damage, which poses a potential moldhazard. The building needs large-scale restoration and the owners do not know the status of their store’s structural integrity. Therefore, the owners do not know when they can open for business again. In an interview for the website Prospect Heights Patch, the shop owner stated, “It’s like you wake up one morning and you don’t have a business anymore. Devastated. That’s exactly how you feel. It’s a hardship, we have families, we have newborns to feed, and then you have to deal with this.”
What was missing for the cell phone storeowners was a business continuity plan—a plan that outlines how to keep a business going in an event such as this. Fires, water damage and natural disasters are among the top killers of small businesses when the owners do not have a plan to recoverbefore an incident occurs. While one cannot always prevent a disaster from happening, one can prevent the need to suffer through the hardships that may follow.
An accidental grease fire in the former courthouse and First National Bank in Cadiz, OH on May 6, 2011 left a historical building in ruins, four tenants homeless and a store out of business. Today, owners Tom and Vicki Cole report that they want to restore the building in spite of the fire damage.
Official suspect the eight-alarm fire started when a tenant in the building left potatoes frying on her stovetop and walked away to chat with a neighbor. Firefighters used over 100,000 gallons of water to extinguish the blaze, which caused extensive water damageto the second and third stories of the building. Additionally, a gap in the roof left by the fire allowed rain to pour in and add to the excessive moisture already in the historic building, causing mold damage.
Wanting to preserve the town’s historical connection to the old courthouse, the Coles plan to shrink-wrap the building to protect it from further water damage. Tom Cole states the shrink-wrap material is made out of a polyurethane material that professionals will stretch over the entire roof after crews place boards over the windows. After wrapping the roof, the Coles will work on clearing the burned debris and restoring the burned building even though they are not sure how they will use it, as they did not have a business continuity plan in place.
Dangerous to your health and destructive to your belongings, mold spores are always in the air and summer can provide them with the right conditions to grow, especially if you do not have an air conditioner in your building. When it comes to this destructive fungal force, prevention is as important as its treatment, if not more.
