Mountain Or Mold Hill? Are We Throwing Good Money After Bad?

Mold infestation in Saint Lucia—a problem that for several years has plagued us—has been turned into still another football to be kicked around by politicians in and out of uniform. For more important to the players than a solution, especially where our schools are concerned, is the opportunity to paint one another in the color of blame. Recall the education minister Gale Rigobert’s most recent contribution to the House, in the debate to the amendments of the VAT Act. This quickly led to a childish verbal contest over which side had spent (wasted?) more money on our schools! No one talked about the possibility that the solution to mold in our situation might have little to do with the millions ineffectively invested. Same old. Same old.

Having spent the last several days researching the causes of mold as well as the best ways to avoid or rectify mold infestation, it turns out that climatic conditions have much to do with it, and that in environments such as ours, the occurrence of mold is inevitable. The floridahealth.gov website puts it this way: “There will always be mold in your home in the form of spores and pieces of mold cells. The presence of mold in the air is normal.” Always? Normal? Not political?

In my research I also came across the fact that mold does not grow only indoors. Per the US National Institute of Environmental Health Sciences, mold is almost everywhere. “Outdoors, molds can be found in shady, damp areas, or places where leaves or other vegetation is decomposing. Indoor molds can grow on virtually any surface, as long as moisture, oxygen, and organic material are present.” 

Is it any wonder that our homes, business places and, yes, our schools, are mold-infested? Mold has always been a problem in Saint Lucia, as we reported in the STAR last week. The more recent problem is that today, especially with the nation being pushed at every opportunity into election mode, we’ve forgotten what we protested about yesterday. 

In September 2014 for instance, the SALCC Students’ Council organized an on-campus protest over mold infestation. The affected SALCC classes were suspended for a week. That occurred, if memory serves, during the last SLP administration. Did “callousness” and “vindictiveness” and “horses” have anything to do with that?  

A keen local observer told the STAR this week that “in many sub-tropical environments, Florida for one, it is a condition of your lease that you do not switch off your air conditioning unit even when you’re not at home. The primary reason for that is your unit is connected physically to other units such as a townhouse or an apartment, and because the AC system is shared, turning yours off creates ideal circumstances for the development of mold—warmth, dampness, darkness.”

“We in the Caribbean are probably even worse off,” the observer continued. “We have almost ideal conditions for mold growth when we switch off AC units until the following morning, typically in government offices and schools.” 

Our informed source went on: “I understand people switch the AC units off to save power. But the truth is that if you put air conditioning into a room or into a building, then you really should be leaving it on. But we can’t afford that. So, it opens up the whole debate about appropriate technology and why we are constructing buildings that cannot be naturally cooled and naturally lit, using sunlight and tropical breezes, which are in abundance.”

An article on the HGTV website supports the idea: “In the summer, a closed house with the air-conditioning turned off will have higher humidity levels than an air-conditioned home. A vacant house also receives little or no sunlight through closed shades—and no air movement with the fan off and the doors locked. The air conditioning would have cooled
the home and removed moisture from the air and circulated and filtered the air. Molds thrive when the humidity levels exceed 70 percent.”

Although it seems a simple solution to the warmer climes of the United States, is keeping switched on our AC units a remedy that local governments can afford? With IT labs and air-conditioning units being installed in every public school, could this be a contributing factor to the recurrence of mold?  Finally this reminder from the National Institute of Environmental Health Sciences in the United States: “People are exposed to molds every day and everywhere, at home, at work, at school, both indoors and out.” I should add that not everyone is susceptible to mold. But we’ll return to that in our next issue.