Petrosik Family Mold Remediation

In the spring of 2016, our family purchased and moved into a house in Pasadena, Maryland when I was stationed at the Naval Academy. Noah, our oldest son, was 7 months old at the time, and Brittany had just found out that she was pregnant with Gavin, due that November only 13 months after Noah.

Over the coming years, our family started experiencing various health challenges, starting with anxiety, depression and emotional challenges. We thought that it was only the stress of having two kids close together, starting a new job and moving in just over a year. The health problems continued to build to migraines, fatigue, breathing problems, bronchitis, prolonged colds with long lingering congestion, and skin rashes (Noah’s 6th birthday was when a child asked what was wrong with Brittany’s skin because she had sores covering the entirety of her arms that would not heal). The health problems continued to grow and culminated with the miscarriage of a pregnancy at the start of 2023.

After months of working with an integrative medicine doctor, Brittany was told that she likely was suffering from mold exposure. She was told that she would have to find out where she was being exposed and remediate before proceeding with treating the problem within her body. We knew that we lived in an older home, but had no physical or visual indications that the mold was coming from our current house.

In the fall of 2021, Noah was struggling with very big emotions, feeling the highest of highs and the lowest of lows which made us very concerned for his mental health. We had worked with multiple therapists with different approaches to try to find some sort of relief for Noah and the struggles that he was and still is dealing with. The director of his forest school and forest therapy had no knowledge of Brittany’s mold diagnosis, and in communication over how to best help Noah, she mentioned that we may want to have him tested for mold toxicity. This was a shock to us both. Upon taking him to an integrative health practitioner, Noah was found to have five different types of mold thriving in his bloodstream. Too many circumstances were lining up to allow us to brush off the mold hypothesis.

We started working with an indoor environmental specialist to help us try to determine the source of our mold. Our air purifiers and dehumidifiers got turned off to get ready for testing. We started with a broad test of the upstairs and downstairs just to see where the higher concentration of mold was coming from. And as it turns out we had mold 1,391 times higher than the average home in the United States in our lower level. This surprised us because we were never able to find any physical sources of mold in our lower level.

In late March, Brittany came home one day to find that I had discovered wet carpet in our lower level. I had pulled back the carpet to discover water coming into our home and mold under our carpet and on our front wall. We did not know how long this water had been coming in or if it was the original cause of our problem, but we thought that we had found the culprit to our health issues and were excited to hopefully start closing this chapter of our journey through life.

We called in a remediation company. We called the indoor environmental specialist. We called a well drilling and plumbing company to determine the source of water. We called in Mold and Waterproofing companies. It turns out that our well line had burst about a foot outside of our house. We thought that we had narrowed down the problem and couldn’t wait to get that mold out of our house. However, during remediation, the company found that mold extended far beyond the front wall of our home. The company determined that at some point in the past we have had a Category 3 water intrusion in this house that was not properly remediated. Category 3 water is defined as flood or storm surge with a hurricane and is equivalent to sewage water (all building material should have been completely removed). The mold and bacteria growth under the vinyl flooring (which was two layers under the carpet we had had installed after buying the house) sat undisturbed for who knows how long but began growing out from under the flooring onto the walls and baseboards. All building materials in this room needed to be ripped out. We can only assume that the previous owners only dried the flooring after a hurricane that came through approximately 20 years ago and placed new flooring on top of the dried contaminated flooring. This assumption is based on conversations with neighbors that were living here during Hurricane Isabel in 2003.

With that complete, and the knowledge of how extensive the damage was, we now need to proceed to clear out our entire basement and have all building materials that could have potentially been in the basement at that time removed. Once that is complete, we will need to thoroughly clean our upstairs, remove carpets, mattresses, fabrics and organic materials that mold may feed off of, and replace them due to cross contamination and mold spores traveling upstairs. We are working tirelessly to thoroughly clean our belongings so that they don’t continue to endanger our health, and clear out enough of our belongings to properly clean our home and make it safe for us to heal and live in.

We have had to pay out of pocket for doctors visits for the better part of a decade since most modern medicine or health insurance doesn’t believe that this is a major problem. Homeowners insurance will not cover any of this since it was not sudden and accidental nor did the leak originate inside of the home. Flood insurance will not cover any of it because the act of God did not occur while we, the current policy holders, had our policy. We managed to find the funds to have the first half of our downstairs remediated. Unfortunately, we still have a ways to go to make our home safe and to heal ourselves. Rebuilding our home will take time; our main concern is the remediation of our home and the detoxification of our bodies.

We are reaching out to ask for help with the $25,000 remediation bill so that we can do the very best to take care of our family, and to continue to find hope in what has been a very real struggle over the past 7 years.