Family's Dream is Shattered by Toxic Mold -

Pat Smith
Bulletin Staff

In November of 1993, Larry and Alda Brunson moved into their dream home, a beautiful brand new two-story house in Alden Bridge in The Woodlands, complete with a separate fenced yard for their dogs, and a large swimming pool and hot tub with mosaic tile pictures.

They spent lots of extra money to customize the house and make it truly theirs, putting a hardwood floor of Larry's own design laid diagonally throughout much of the first story. They also spent some extra money they now regret-instead of having the synthetic stucco exterior siding in just a few places as decorative accent, they paid to have the entire house sheathed in the product. And that decision sealed not only their house, but their future.

For unbeknownst to the Brunsons, the EIFS or Exterior Finishing and Insulation System product they had put on their home would eventually trap water deep inside their walls, which led to rotting wood and a loss of structural integrity of the home. That was bad, but worse yet was the hidden growth of a deadly poison, tachybotrys mold, so dangerous that it almost cost the Brunsons the life of their daughter, Iris, before they discovered what was going on.

"I felt bad almost from the day we moved into the house," Iris, now 16, recalls, "but it didn't really start to get bad until 1996 or so when I was in sixth grade. By the seventh grade, I'd had my first trip to the emergency room when I went into anaphylactic shock in my bed."

Iris's lips became so swollen she thought they would burst. The extreme swelling shut off her air supply, and doctors had to fight to get a breathing tube down her throat. After an injection of adrenaline, the swelling started to come down and the crisis was over. Since Iris had been home from school sick that day, doctors believed the episode somehow had some relation to Iris's illness, and sent the girl home with her parents. She had a few more episodes of shock, but still it didn't register with anyone that her problems may have been caused by the house she was living in.
When Iris entered eighth grade, she had her braces removed, and real trouble started. She had developed the habit of putting her retainer on the window sill of her bedroom during the day, so it would be handy to grab and put into her mouth at night. But growing behind the wall underneath that window was a thick carpet of deadly stacybotrys mold, which grew larger each time it rained and water leaked through the poorly installed flashing surrounding the window. When the weather was dry, the mold released millions of spores into the air of Iris's room. By the time she put her retainer into her mouth each evening, it was covered with thousands of invisible mold spores, and minutes later, she would go into anaphylactic shock and almost die. ER personnel would grill Iris and her family relentlessly with each visit. "Did you take a drug? Have you eaten shell fish?" "It was humiliating," Alda says. "No one stopped to think that what was poisoning her was the air she was breathing in her own bedroom."

The episodes became so frequent that emergency personnel trained her father, a dentist, and her mother, a dental hygienist, to administer the injections necessary to arrest the allergic reaction and save their daughter's life.

Alda was beside herself with worry. Doctors could offer no explanation for the chronic nosebleeds that Iris suffered, or her increasingly frequent attacks of anaphalaxsis. They couldn't figure out why Alda's son, Blake's had repeated sniffles, or why she had near-constant migraine headaches and sinus problems. Most troubling of all was her mental confusion and fogginess. "I would go to the grocery and buy food, then come home and wonder where it was," Alda says. "Then I would find out I had walked off and left it at the
check out line in the grocery."

Blake would never accept any medicine from his mom for his colds, because he said it always cleared up after he left the house. Alda says she was so foggy she couldn't put all the clues together, to see that Blake felt better and stopped sniffling once got on the school bus, and that Iris only went into shock after she went to bed at night. Only Larry Brunson was free of physical symptoms. Alda thinks that's because her husband spends much of his time each day in his office seeing patients, and was at home fewer hours than other family members.
Finally, Iris's condition was getting so bad that Alda began to worry she might lose her daughter. "It was getting harder and harder to `get her back' from each episode, and I really was terrified there was going to be a day when she went into anaphalaxsis and no one was going to be there to help her, and she would die."

Alda says that one day she just fell down on her kitchen floor crying, asking God to help her find out what was wrong so she could save her child. The very next day, a neighbor came by with some information she had downloaded off the Internet about sick house syndrome. The woman had gone to the web site after seeing a 48 Hours episode on CBS that featured several families who had either lost family members to stachybotrys mold, or had family members who had suffered devastating toxic mold side effects like blindness or brain damage.
Alda had her answer. A microbiologist confirmed the presence of the deadly mold inside several of the home's walls, and recommended they get out immediately. When her husband came home from work that evening, he found Alda packing. "We've got to get out of this house before it kills us all," she told him. "He thought I had lost my mind."

(Toxicologists now recommend that families immediately abandon not only the house, but all its contents, including all furnishings clothing, books, toys, videos, CDs, pictures, dishes, pots and pans, etc., but the Brunsons did take some of their hardwood furniture to their new house, along with some of their clothing and a few personal effects, but they had to leave all their good friends in the neighborhood behind.)
Though the move solved the immediate problem, (Iris hasn't gone into shock in the ten months the family has been in their new home) it has created other worries. The Brunsons now have two house notes, one for the place they are living, and another for the house infested with toxic mold. They cannot sell the house with mold because it couldn't pass an inspection, and the bid to just go in and remove the mold was in the neighborhood of $90,000, which they cannot afford. To replace all the rotten wood in the house would cost thousands more.

The removal of toxic mold is not covered in most residential insurance policies, the Brunsons' included, so families who find themselves in this situation are stuck financially. The family has hired a lawyer, Mark Wham, and filed a lawsuit against the builder of their home, the manufacturers of the synthetic stucco, and the contractors who did such a poor job of installation that the stucco leaked water into the interior walls from day one. They are asking for enough money to remove all the toxic mold from the house, replace all the rotted wood, remove the synthetic tucco, repair all the structural damage, cover their medical expenses and reimburse them for the personal injuries they suffered as a result of exposure to the mold's toxins.

"I am finding more and more of these mold cases," Wham says. "Just today, I was contacted by a woman who went blind after stachybotrys mold damaged her optic nerves." (Wham says the woman has recovered some sight after receiving medical treatment.) "Many families who have mold problems first notice symptoms in their pets or very young children," he says.

Wham says one unsuspecting family put a guinea pig in a cage next to a wall infested with stachbotrys. Within a week, it was dead. Other pets lose all their hair, or have continual problems with digestive upsets.
Another client has a child who constantly threw up. As a result, the child was a very picky eater. When his mother, who is from Malaysia, went home to visit, she warned her family that her son would not eat anything because of his sensitive stomach. To her amazement, the child ate everything in sight and kept it down, gaining almost eight pounds before returning home. As soon as he got back into the mold-infected house in The Woodlands, he stopped eating, started throwing up again and lost weight. The family has since moved from the house, and the child is recovering.

While their case winds through the legal system, Alda and her kids are fighting to get their health back. They are under the care of several doctors, including Dr. Andrew Campbell, a toxic mold specialist. Alda and Iris are currently undergoing 12 weeks of gamma globulin injections to build up their depressed immune systems so they can withstand a course of the harsh anti-fungal drugs they need to rid their bodies of the stachybotrys toxins. Blake has nerve damage in his upper body, and other neurological problems which have started to clear up since he is no longer exposed to stachybotrys on a daily basis. Alda devotes much of her time to spreading the word about stachybotrys mold, and trying to help other people who discover their houses have been infected with mold. Iris is being home-schooled for tenth grade, but hopes to rejoin her classmates this fall for eleventh grade at The Woodlands High School.

The family's old home is locked up and abandoned. Large squares of siding are missing where engineers, microbiologists, moisture experts and others have taken samples to determine the extent of the mold infestation and structural damage. The family is shoehorned into a much smaller house now, but every summer, they still go barbecue in their old back yard, splash around in their pool and hot tub, and think about what they have lost, and what they have saved.
"We worked so hard, we planned and saved for so long to build that house," Alda says wistfully as she looks at the lovely curves of her former kitchen window. "But we still have so much for which to be grateful, including the fact that our daughter can now live a pretty normal life. We indentified the threat to her life that was for so kong just a mystery. I hope to help other people who are dealing with this same problem, and I hope to bring about more awareness among both builders and buyers of homes in this damp area of the importance of quality in matierials and workmanship."

NOTE: Because of a rash of mold-related lawsuits, the EIFS product used on the Brunson home has not been manufactured since 1996.

The company that made it has redesigned the product so that it now has interior channels to carry moisture away from the walls to the outside, similar to the weep holes traditionally used to handle moisture in brick construction.