Wahconah High Mold Remediation Complete; Investigation Ongoing
DALTON, Mass. — The mold remediation in the Wahconah High School auditorium is complete, and the air levels are safe and meet the state standard.
During last month's School Committee meeting, it was announced that penicillium, a type of mold, was growing on the auditorium's walls.
The mold was "in different places" in the auditorium, but anyone would have to have been "pretty observant" to see it," said Superintendent Leslie Blake-Davis during last month’s meeting.
"It's not something that, if you just walked in, you would see right away."
Now that the mold has been remediated, the district is working on determining what went wrong to prevent this from happening again in the future, School Committee Chair Richard Peters said during Thursday's meeting.
The district is examining the hardware and digital controls of the heating, ventilation, and air conditioning systems to determine what went wrong and who is responsible, Blake-Davis said.
At the same time, the district is also trying to repair those things that went wrong, she said.
"We're pushing for a timeline. We're pushing to get this repaired as quickly as possible," the superintendent said.
The HVAC system is not at a point where it can control the climate in the auditorium, so there are still commercial-grade dehumidifiers in the space to manually control it, she said.
"It's a safe space in terms of, you can go in there but it still has the commercial grade dehumidifiers in there," Blake-Davis said.
There were errors in a number of places, including the installation, commission, maintenance of the control system, and it is unclear what caused the mold growth, Peters said.
"It might have been also a combination of any of those errors and the extreme weather that we had this summer, and nobody in the building led to the mold," he said.
Mold and mildew discovered at Brayton Elementary School North Adams was also blamed on the high humidity as well as an insufficient HVAC system.
Given what was found during the investigation, the district will have to look at all the HVAC systems in the building to see how they are working, Peters said.
"There certainly are some issues that we've uncovered that would point to, maybe not our responsibility, somebody else's responsibility. Mistakes have been made, put it that way," Peters said
The system is not under warranty anymore. It went out of warranty a year after being installed, and now it is in its third year, he said.
"What's interesting is that it could have been like this all along, and we didn't know, and it might have been just because of the extreme weather that we had took it over the edge, and it happened in the summer. We don't really know, and that's an investigation that's ongoing right now," Peters said.
The district had an independent company download the system data, which has been moved to its protected servers, Peters said
The data will allow them to see when the humidity levels increased and what caused it to happen, he said.
Every week, somebody is working on the system. There are a lot of parties at play here, Peters said.
"Number one priority is getting the auditorium open again, but we really can't open it until we know we're in control of it, so we don't have mold come back," he said.
"So that's why the dehumidifiers are still in there. Hopefully that happens in the next week or two. The looking at the rest of the system is going to be ongoing, and also, the forensic is going to take a little while."
Tags: mold, Wahconah,
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