mold-symptom.com

BRECKENRIDGE - Ski-resort officials on Wednesday ordered the evacuation of about 300 residents of a 3-year-old, $21 million employee-housing complex after an outbreak of mold reached epidemic proportions.

With Breckenridge Ski Resort set to open Friday, residents of all 180 units of the Breckenridge Terrace apartments - mostly ski- area employees and low-paid laborers - are being told they must leave by the end of the month. Many will have to seek market- cost housing at a particularly competitive time of year.

"The experts have told us there is enough evidence of mold across all the units that we are taking this precautionary step. It's time for everyone to move out," said Rick Smith, vice president for human resources at Vail Resorts, the ski-resort company that owns the apartment complex along with the Summit Housing Authority.

Smith broke the news Wednesday night to about 75 visibly upset residents at the community's clubhouse, saying the evacuation was a safety issue.

"We've got two weeks to find a place. You see all these people? Where can we go?" said Hugo Victor, who lives in a unit with his wife and 3-month-old daughter.

Vail Resorts is offering its long- term employees dormitory-style housing at nearby Keystone and is attempting to secure master leases for other apartments.

But officials say as many as half the residents will have to find housing on their own.

"The only good news in this whole stinking thing is we're in the softest market for real estate that we've seen in a decade," Smith said.

Like many parents in the complex, Rhonda Marshall worried that she would have to transfer her 6-year-old son from Upper Blue Elementary School.

"We've built a whole life around living here," she said.

Many residents expressed doubt that they can find nearby housing for comparable prices - as little as $750 a month for a one-bedroom, one-bath apartment in a notoriously high-rent district - and some questioned the timing of the announcement, given that mold has been a concern for two years.

"You actually knew we had a problem before," said bank employee Kelli Cole, who signed a lease for a year in September along with a separate rider holding her responsible for any incidental mold discovered.

Smith, however, said the extent of the problem was unknown until this week and that officials will have to shut down the entire 17- building complex because of health liabilities.

"It's certainly not something that we want to do," he told the crowd.

No specific health problems have been associated with the current mold outbreak. But when disturbed, mold spores can exacerbate respiratory problems or cause allergic reactions, said Joan Wickersheim, a hygienist with Denver-based A.G. Wassenaar Inc. who was brought in to examine the units.

"At this point, we don't feel that there is a serious health-hazard issue at Breck Terrace," she said. "Everyone has a different response to mold and mold spores."

Noting that mold spores are omnipresent despite the arid mountain environment, Wickersheim said the problem can have several causes, all resulting in moisture accumulation on paper-lined drywall, particle board and wood.

The tasteful wood-trimmed units opened in 2001 to great fanfare, as Vail Resorts set the industry standard in providing high-quality housing to employees.

But mold was discovered in spots only a year later, and the problem has grown so bad in recent weeks that residents routinely were finding it on walls and in carpets.

"It's disappointing when you spend this kind of money and try to provide living accommodations for our employees and make such a positive difference in our community," Smith said. "It's disheartening."

Residents could be displaced for six months to a year while officials try to determine the cause of the mold growth and then fix it through costly efforts such as ripping out and replacing walls, insulation, drywall and floorboards.

Ed Fronapfel, a forensic engineer with Professional Investigative Engineers of Westminster, said that in recent years, homebuilders have learned to construct "tighter" buildings for energy efficiency, but work crews have not kept pace with better water-prevention techniques.

"We truly see it on all ranges of houses, residential and commercial," he said. "You're dealing with the same crews, the same subtrades. They flash a window wrong on a production house the same way they do it on a custom house."

Additionally, the problem can be worse in the mountains because buildings kept comfortably warm on the inside "sweat" when surrounded by the cold outside air, much the way condensation forms on the glass of a cold drink on a hot day.

"Really, what we're building are terrariums," Fronapfel said. "We build tight houses and put very humid things inside them. ... We're not thinking, 'If we put this humid air in the houses, we have to get it out."'

When the latest outbreak was discovered two weeks ago, officials offered employees in units with visible mold the opportunity to stay temporarily in the resort-owned Breckenridge Mountain Lodge, and even provided them with free meals because there are no cooking facilities.

But with the ski season fast approaching, even those 120 displaced residents now must move out of the upscale hotel.
Vail officials say they are working with the original construction contractors to determine the causes and come up with a plan to fix them, which could cost millions of dollars.

"This was not cheap employee housing," Smith said. "We need to ... develop a long-term fix. Once we do that, we'll figure out how much and how long, and our legal folks are trying to figure out who pays."