Living Green Magazine –
By Maile Pingel for TakePart.com
When an apartment flood strikes, Maile Pingel learns that water damage is only the beginning.
Several weeks ago, I came home to find my husband in a panic and water pouring down like rain from our ceilings. Our upstairs neighbor’s bathroom had flooded, and our apartment was fast filling with water.
With the help of maintenance teams, we frantically moved furniture and covered everything we could with plastic sheeting. A fortunate pattern of cracking meant that most everything special was spared, but what took the greatest hit was the carpeting, which turned from a creamy shade of white to an indescribable shade of brown in seconds. In came security. In came the wet vac. In came the dehumidifier. And almost instantly, in came the mold.
Though the water had been shut off, it took the better part of the day for all of the water to finish filtering through the space between our units. While I’ve thought a lot about the architecture of our building, which dates to the mid-1940s, I’d never contemplated what exists between the floors. It’s not a pleasant realization: decades of dust and grime, spores of all sorts, and undoubtedly a host of creepy crawlers.
In a matter of hours, the cracks widened as plaster peeled away, and our ceilings began to take on an ombré-like effect, the greenish-black cracks giving way to ochre splotches that branched out into a raised dove-gray pattern. For a moment, as I stood bemuddled in the bedroom, I saw a strange sort of beauty. One giant gash reminded me of satellite images my father showed me when I was little. “It looks like the Nile,” I thought. “The Nile is twisting across our bedroom.” I played with Instagram, turning the photos into modernist abstractions, and then lost all humor.
Read the rest of the article at https://www.takepart.com/article/2014/02/26/mold-most-unwanted-houseguest
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