Mold Moving into Apartments
by Carolyn Scofield - www.wptv.com
A Ft. Pierce couple says mold moved into their
apartment…and they had to move out.
Water floods the kitchen every time Mindy
Booth takes a shower. Something is beginning to grow inside the cabinet
and three weeks ago, doctors put Booth's daughter on a breathing machine.
“She's a year and four months,” says
Booth. “And I have to sit here in my lap and put this on her mouth while
she cries to me because she can't breathe.”
Booth believes mold is overrunning her apartment.
The problem gets worse next door.
Amanda King and her boyfriend took what they could salvage and left.
King called her landlords. She says
they put a bucket under the leak causing all the water problems upstairs.
King says did nothing to clean up the
moisture and the mold started to grow.
Now it covers almost everything in the
apartment- the walls, the cabinets, even the big-screen TV.
“We called an environmental specialist and
asked him, ‘Are we allowed to take that television, even if we blow it out?’,”
King says. “Absolutely not, there's no way you can get all those spores
out of that television.”
In fact, a letter from cleanup company
Servepro advised King to throw away anything porous, including her bed
and sofa.
King wants her landlords to pay for the
losses, and Booth wants them to fix the problem before her baby gets worse.
“Every night when I hold her and put that
thing on her, she hates it,” says Booth. “And I have to. I'm her
Mom. I gotta do something to try to make her better, but it's not getting
any better, Nothing is getting any better.”
Robert and Zelma Knippenburg own the property. They say tenants waited to
report the water and mold problems, and they couldn't get in to fix them.
The Knippenburgs returned Amanda King's
security deposit and say they've never had complaints in the 13 years they've
owned the building.
http://www.wptv.com/news/local/story.aspx?content_id=acb02a58-deb5-4622-8e94-7e82cf3abb2a&rss=762
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