Haunted by Mold
By Lisa Belkin
Published: August 12, 2001
Melinda Ballard parks her cream-colored Jaguar next to her deserted dream house in Dripping Springs, Tex. -- a house she fled more than two years ago, leaving dirty dishes in the sink and unopened mail on the counter. Popping open the Jag's trunk, she pulls out two portable respirator masks. ''These won't screen out all the mycotoxins,'' she warns as she tosses one to me. ''That's the dangerous stuff, so we'll only stay a few minutes.''
I follow as she wades through the strawlike remains of what was once a manicured garden, past the abandoned pool, the empty hot tub and the exquisite leaded glass that frames the front door. A sign on that door warns that we should really be wearing full Tyvek biohazard ''moon suits'' too, but this is a Texas summer, and we would probably die of heatstroke before the mycotoxins could get us. So we each fit a heavy black contraption over our noses and mouths, pull the elastic tight to form a seal and snap on our rubber gloves.
Warning: Reading this story might make you sick. Not as sick as Melinda Ballard and her family, who began coughing up blood and suffering memory loss while living in this 22-room, 11,000-square-foot mansion. But it could make your skin itch and your throat hurt, and you could start to cough. Then you will wonder whether there is toxic mold growing in your house, too, and whether you should pay someone a great deal of money to come find out.
That is the thing about toxic mold. Many of its symptoms are documented and real, but it can also be spread by suggestion and word of mouth. And lately, the slimy black growth, with names like Stachybotrys chartarum, Aspergillus and Penicillium seems to be everywhere -- in stately homes and housing projects, courthouses and libraries, factories and schools. One California lawyer alone is handling mold complaints for 1,000 clients. A physician in Reno, Nev., has evaluated or treated more than a thousand patients suffering from toxic-mold exposure. And in Texas, where the warm, wet climate is a perfect breeding ground, mold claims appear to have more than doubled since last year -- just the beginning of what is shaping up to be a very expensive epidemic.
Melinda Ballard's house has become an emblem of the mold invasion. There is as much mold here as anyone has ever seen. The place is Exhibit A for lawyers, a how-not-to guide for homeowners, a business handbook for contractors and an ongoing nightmare for insurers. As we walk in through an unlocked side door (''Who would be stupid enough to come in and steal anything?'' Ballard says) this dream home certainly looks like a nightmare: the House That Mold Ate.
Armies of inspectors have been through this house in the more than two years since Ballard, her husband, Ron Allison, and their son, Reese, now 5, left. The investigators cut square holes in nearly every wall, then removed the Sheetrock to reveal a coating of mold hiding on the other side. It is thick and black and gangrenous, with a dull, powdery sheen that makes it seem waiting and alive. Just looking at it makes you want to throw up. Each colonized square of Sheetrock has been sealed in plastic and tacked on the wall whence it came, for future reference. As a result, the house feels like a mad scientist's lab, with plastic bags of mold wherever you turn -- near the sweeping Tara staircase in the front hall, interrupting the hand-painted murals on the walls, next to a portrait of Ballard in regal jewels and finery, behind the Erector set in Reese's bedroom.
We stay for less than 10 minutes, but it is long enough. As we pull back down the endless driveway, my mouth feels dry, my throat aches and I am dizzy. Or maybe it's all in my head.
Moldy homes have been around since biblical times. Mold may even explain many of the plagues, if you accept that the crops had to be brought in early to escape the hail and locusts, meaning wet grain was stored in stacks when the darkness came, creating perfect breeding grounds for mold. The pampered firstborn sons may have eaten the top layer, and the toxins in the moldy grain could have killed them. In Leviticus 14:33-45, the Lord tells Moses and Aaron how to rid a house of mold. First ask a priest to inspect it. Then scrape the inside walls and throw all contaminated materials in an unclean part of town. If that doesn't work, the house ''must be torn down -- its stones, timbers and all the plaster.''
''That's exactly what we do today, except we skip the priest part,'' says David C. Straus, who, as a professor of microbiology and immunology at Texas Tech University Health Sciences Center, is a 21st-century version of a mold priest. The molds that Straus and others try to exorcise are everywhere. There are thousands of varieties, found in every region of the country, including the wildly different climates of Alaska and Hawaii. Virtually every breath you take contains mold spores, and although some people are more allergic than others, for most of us this is not a problem.
Indoors, the drama begins when the spores encounter steady and significant amounts of water, commonly in the form of a roof leak or an unnoticed burst in a pipe. Add a cellulose-based material -- the wallboards that modern homes are made of and older homes are renovated with turn out to be the perfect snack for multiplying mold -- and things get worse. ''These organisms go, 'Aha, I'm going to grow from a few spores on the surface to a colony that can be seen by the naked eye, containing hundreds of thousands or even millions of spores,' '' says Linda D. Stetzenbach, director of the microbiology division of the Harry Reid Center for Environmental Studies at the University of Nevada in Las Vegas.
This in and of itself is not necessarily a problem, either. Most molds, even multiplying ones, are relatively harmless, and most people won't have a strong reaction to them (unless they're allergic). But there is mold, and there is mold. Exposure to certain types of fungi, known as toxic mold, can cause a serious reaction. If you're unlucky, this is the kind of mold you have. If you're really unlucky, your toxic mold will gird for battle and go to war, secreting chemicals called mycotoxins, which can find their way into your body, entering through your nose, mouth and skin, lodging perhaps in your digestive tract, your lungs or your brain. Among these toxins are trichothecenes, which were rumored to have been used as a biological weapon during the wars in Afghanistan and Vietnam. They turned out not to be very useful as weapons, however, because they poison slowly and erratically. That was small comfort to Ballard, however, when the stuff was found throughout her house.
Nor is she comforted by the fact that these molds are not really attacking humans. We simply get in their way. Their real targets are plants and other fungi that compete with them for water and food. ''They're just doing what nature programmed them to do,'' says Stetzenbach, sympathizing with the mold she studies. ''If they can keep other organisms from inhabiting their space, then they get all the nutrients.''
One of the first human soldiers in the mold wars was Bill Holder, who was trained as a mechanical, electrical and plumbing contractor and whose first encounters with mold were inside air-conditioning systems. Back in 1987 Holder received a frantic call from a former customer who owned a $55 million hotel that was rife with mold. As a favor, and because no one else seemed to know what to do, Holder gave it a try.
Within a few years mold was his specialty. He was certain that these micro-organisms were responsible for serious health problems because ''every time we were called to a building it was because people were getting sick.'' But then, as now, he could find no irrefutable medical data to confirm his belief. In 1995 he sold his contracting business and eventually formed Assured Indoor Air Quality, a company created to tackle mold problems. One founding partner was a former school administrator, so the group began working on mold-infested schools, and has evaluated or cleaned out (the term of art is ''remediated'') more than 1,000 in the past six years.
Along the way Assured Indoor Air Quality awarded research grants to scientists, and one went to Straus at the Texas Tech University Health Sciences Center in Lubbock. On April 1, 1999, Holder was flying to a meeting there. The front rows of seats faced each other on Southwest Airlines, and a thin, no-nonsense businesswoman sat across from him, on her way to Arkansas for a meeting of her own. They got to talking during the flight, and the woman complained about the parade of contractors and inspectors marching in and out of her house. As she talked, she coughed, and her Kleenex showed chunks of blood.
''Excuse my asking,'' Holder said, ''but have you by any chance had a leak in your house?''
The woman was Melinda Ballard, and yes, she had most certainly had a leak. ''You're talking to Noah about the flood,'' she told Holder, because that's the way she talks. She also swears as easily as she speaks, has no patience for anyone who doesn't work as hard as she does, will insult you to your face if she thinks you're trying to ''bamboozle'' her and was warned by one lawyer before her mold lawsuit went before the jury that she had to practice being a ''dutiful Southern belle'' because men on the jury ''would be thinking, God, I would hate to be married to her.'' (She fired that lawyer.)
Raised in wealth, Ballard made her own fortune in advertising and public relations in New York and moved to Dripping Springs in 1990. Fancying herself a cowgirl, she bought two cows named Jethro and Ellie Mae and lived with them and a herd of deer on 73 acres. In 1994 she married Ron Allison, an Austin investment adviser, who was as ambitious and hard-driving as she was. Their son, Reese, was born in 1996.
When Reese was 2, the house had a leak, which Ballard and Allison paid a plumber to repair. It seemed so inconsequential at the time that they did not even report it to their insurance company. A few months later the hardwood floors around the house began to warp and buckle. Ballard then filed a claim with Farmers Insurance Group. She and the company exchanged a number of letters on the subject of the floor, and one of those, to Theresa McConnell, a claims representative, read: ''Molds and mildew are trapped underneath the floor and will escape into the house once the foundation is exposed. I would like for every effort to be made to ensure that the molds/mildew do not ruin furniture, carpets, etc.''
This was the first mention of the word ''mold.'' After much arguing over the cost of the repairs, Farmers paid Ballard well over $100,000 to fix a variety of things related to leaks. As Farmers wrote check after check, it also pursued ways to stop writing them. Asserting that Ballard was ''underinsured,'' the company held some money back as a result. Ballard then accused Farmers of stalling because it did not want to reimburse the whole of such an expensive claim, an allegation the company denies.
Meanwhile, Reese Allison developed asthma. Melinda began having dizzy spells. The family visited a variety of doctors a total of about 50 times over a three-month period. Ron Allison had the strangest symptoms. He would forget simple things like where he'd left his credit card or where he'd parked his car, or even what kind of car he owned. His co-workers would find him at his desk looking as if he were in a trance.
But mold was not mentioned again until March 1999, when a Farmers investigator, who was in the house to inspect the source of damage to the kitchen floor, pulled back the refrigerator and revealed a wall that was shockingly slimy black. A month later, Ballard met Holder on the plane. ''I think I might know what's causing your problems,'' she remembers him saying, then he offered to provide her with a list of home contractors who might help.
Ballard did not want anyone else's name. Holder was the first person she had met who seemed to know what was happening to her house and to her family, and she wanted him to help. He explained that his company worked only on schools and on commercial buildings. She went home and did some research. ''You're remediating the governor's mansion; that's a house,'' she told Holder by phone a few days later. The fact that Laura Bush was showing symptoms of mold sensitivity (Holder located the source in the air-conditioning system) was supposed to be a secret, but Ballard had connections and was not used to taking no for an answer.
Four days after their serendipitous plane ride, Holder visited Ballard in Dripping Springs. ''I looked in a few places I've learned to look,'' he says -- under an undisturbed board in the dining room, inside a crawl space beneath the stairs -- and found more pockets of mold. Two days later, tests showed that mold to include Stachybotrys and Penicillium, and Holder advised further tests. In the meantime, Ballard and her family moved to a nanny's apartment next to the garage.
The insurance company sent an investigator to collect its own air samples, and Ballard hired Holder, who brought along two other experts, including David Straus, to help conduct additional tests. Straus barely lasted 30 minutes. ''Walking into that house was one of the biggest mistakes I ever made,'' he says. ''None of us were wearing any protection. I was standing on that Tara staircase, and all of a sudden I didn't feel very good.'' Straus spent the next four hours lying in Holder's truck, crawling out only to vomit. He also lost 25 percent of the hearing in one ear, and the damage seems to be permanent.
''I don't go into Stachy houses anymore,'' he says, theorizing that his repeated exposure over the years has left him highly sensitive to toxic mold. ''I let the young people do that.''