January 8, 2007

Mold in Town Hall and police headquarters will force Greenwood to spend about $30,000 in remediation, Mayor Ernest Lampkins said.

The mold was discovered about a week ago after continuing water problems at the police station caused concern, he said.

The amount of mold required action but, in his view, doesn't constitute a health threat. "We found out the problem in (Town Hall) where we are is worse, but neither is a very bad situation.

Tests show "outdoors it was 10 times higher than inside," Lampkins said.

The remediation will be done by Clean Air Systems, which submitted its bid during the Board of Aldermen meeting Thursday, the mayor said.

Work, at a cost of about $15,000 per building, should begin Jan. 15. The money will come from capital outlay funds that already are in hand, Lampkins said. "We will be able to handle it easily."

The initial study to determine the presence and amount of mold was done by SRP Environmental.

There is a guideline but not a mandated standard of 2,000 colony-forming units of mold to determine whether a structure has an elevated mold count, said Keith Sampson of SRP Environmental. His company found 3,339 colony-forming units in Town Hall and 2,024 in the police station, and its count outside was 37,524.

Sampson said the Greenwood readings are not that unusual. "We've seen indoor counts in the hundreds of thousands."

No Stachybotrys, which the public generally thinks of when they hear the words " black mold," was found, he said. And as far as the mold that was discovered, Sampson said, "this was more of a 'we caught it in time' type thing."

"We will take the administration building and close it until the work is done, rerouting services as we have to," Lampkins said. "But the Police Department will have to relocate because of their equipment. And Chief (J.D.) Dunn is looking for a place to go."

At sometime in the future, both buildings should be replaced, and the town will seek state funds to make that happen, Lampkins said. His office is in a former library building that was joined to Town Hall years ago, and the police station was a small hotel before its current use, he said.

"I've lived in Greenwood 19 years, and it's been used for that all the time I've been here."

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