School of Mold Episode II: Mold Strikes Back

Staff Writer

Macye Farrar

At first, no one thought much about the vacant third-floor dorm room in Johnson Hall. Even though Sewanee’s residence halls were crammed with students, thanks to a large freshman class and two dorms being closed for renovation, new girls passed by the blank door with little thought about what lay inside. 

But anyone who’d lived in Johnson in previous years would know that space—with its door weirdly devoid of strawberry stickers bearing student names and its walls empty of fairy lights and throw pillows—had a story to tell.

Last January, two Johnson girls were told to pack up mold-ridden clothes and bedding and evacuate that very room because of a mold infestation. A February article in The Sewanee Purple recounted how the girls had to move in a snowstorm because of mold creeping across the walls and carpets—a problem they said had been present for weeks before Christmas break.  

That room and another Johnson dorm room would remain unoccupied this school year despite the University having its second-largest freshman class ever.

Although there were no other evacuations due to mold last year, girls who lived in the dorm during the 2023-24 academic terms said girls dealt with multiple health issues and faced other mold-related incidents foreshadowing the current closure of Johnson Hall. 

Ellie Daniels (C’ 27), who lived in the room next to the evacuated room last year, said that there were signs of mold elsewhere in the building after that infected dorm room was closed. When she returned from winter break, she recalled,  her dorm room wall was so wet that her posters had fallen off. After her neighbors moved out, she and her roommate became curious about whether mold had invaded other parts of Johnson, so they began investigating their room. “We were getting stuff out of the fridge and I looked up at our AC unit and was like, ‘I don’t think that’s normal’ because there was stuff in it,” she said, recalling what felt and looked weirdly grayish-black and fuzzy. “It had been falling on top of our fridge, and we were sweeping it off into the trash can.” 

Fearing that mold was spreading in her room, she said, she placed a work order to Facilities Management to have someone check her AC. She said she never received a reply. 

Daniels and other Johnson girls from previous years also recalled having health issues during their time in Johnson Hall; she and her friends termed it the “Johnson Cough.” Daniels said it began in September or October and lingered until July. She added that she began to feel better over winter break after time away from her Johnson room. “We noticed that it was really damp and that we could never take a deep breath without it hurting,” she said. “Just like allergies type stuff, but I guess we all thought it was the mountain air.” 

Charlee Hall (C’ 25), recounted enduring similar symptoms her freshman year. “I also had a really bad cough and a really bad sinus infection,” she said. “I think it started in September. Then I went home for fall break and it was getting better, and I came back and it got way worse again and it lasted another month. And then I started coughing up blood in November.” 

 Hall said she was then placed on four different antibiotics and was reassured by the Wellness Center that her symptoms were due to allergies common to the Domain, so she never suspected that mold could have been the cause. 

Flash forward to this year’s first week of school. Freshmen began peppering Residential Life with new complaints about mold in their rooms—only now, Johnson residents said, it was spreading at an alarming rate. It would be several months before University officials realized the problem was so severe that the dorm needed to be evacuated. 

In a Zoom meeting with parents on Oct. 6, two days after Johnson girls were told to move out,  concerned parents told University officials that their daughters had been trying to get something done about the mold since they arrived on campus in August. In the Zoom call, a recording of which was obtained by The Purple, one parent said her daughter “went through a lot to keep reporting things to the maintenance department. Somebody came out and looked at her internal AC unit. They said they cleaned the filter. She came home for Labor Day weekend, went back, it had grown all over underneath her bed.” 

Although her daughter made multiple reports to her proctor and as well as to ResLife, she was repeatedly told that her room had no mold, another parent said in the Zoom meeting. Another parent described coming to campus for Parent’s Weekend, and instead of attending the campus-wide festivities, spending nearly two hours helping her daughter clean her air conditioner, which was mold-ridden. 

Yet ghostly white mold continued spreading, leaving splotches of white on carpets, according to both parents and students. In the Oct. 6 meetings with students and parents,  Robert Benton, associate vice president for facilities management, said the mold complaints from Johnson had been checked out by the University’s director of risk management, who assesses all complaints about mold issues. Before the final mold complaint was made on Sept. 30, Benson told parents that Sewanee’s risk manager had assessed each report and determined the complaints were due to isolated issues or no mold was present.

But that last Monday in September, a report of mold came from room 229. After seeing the room coated in distinctive patches of powdery gunk, Risk Management contacted outside lab Eurofins USA to test for mold in four different rooms, two of which were unoccupied this semester. 

In the tense Zoom meeting, Provost Scott Wilson told parents, “While our initial understanding was that this might be a single incident, we began to think more that this was a systemic issue beginning on Thursday.” 

After Eurofins reported on Friday afternoon Oct. 4  that it could be dangerous for students to continue living at Johnson, the administration sent word out to all the residents that they needed to move out immediately.  Results from the testing, sent to students and parents on October 7, indicated that 120,000 penicillium/aspergillus spores were detected in room 229 alone. According to the Mayo Clinic, this mold variant is known to cause medical issues such as wheezing, fatigue, coughing up blood, and chest pain. Current and past Johnson girls said they have suffered from these symptoms. 

In their meetings, students and parents demanded to know how the mold got so bad in the first place. One father sounded angry as he recounted the risk management inspector’s visit to his daughter’s dorm room on Sept. 30, after the final mold complaint was sent in. “ He spoke with me on the phone Monday late afternoon,” the father said. “And he told me the humidity levels in the room were high because the room windows were left open.” 

Asked for comment, the University’s risk manager referred The Purple’s request to Parker W. Oliver, Sewanee’s vice president of marketing and communications. In a written statement, Oliver told The Purple that the risk manager wasn’t blaming students for Johnson’s issues. 

“As with all reports of possible mold, the University’s director of risk management, environmental health and safety, Chris Smith, inspected the room in question. During that inspection, he recorded the relative humidity levels at 82%. According to the EPA, [humidity]  levels between 30% and 60% reduce the likelihood of mold growth,” Oliver wrote. “He noticed that a window in the room was open. It was raining at the time, and Sewanee had experienced four straight days of rainy weather. When contacted by a parent of the room’s resident, Mr. Smith mentioned that an open window could be contributing to the high humidity in the room. This statement was in no way intended to indicate student culpability. If students or families took it that way, we are sincerely sorry. That was not our intention.” 

During last month’s Zoom call and meeting with students, Benton said the AC unit in the hallways also contributed to the dorm’s problems. One of its air ducts that was supposed to let in fresh air from the outside became partially blocked. Benton said that blockage created  “negative pressure on the building,” sucking in unfiltered, rain-dampened air. Normally, Benton said, humidity in Sewanee’s dorms is monitored with remote sensors that alert Facilities Management when dampness gets above a certain level. But in September, he said, the system in Johnson failed to report even as humidity in Johnson climbed above 80 percent, the level at which mold easily grows.

 “We had a malfunctioning board or unit [in Johnson] that was not communicating the humidity levels appropriately to our monitoring system here,” he said. “So, we weren’t getting alarmed by the humidity levels that were rising.” Sewanee had previously been through a drought in the early parts of the semester, Benton told parents, until the remnants of Hurricane Helene blew through the Domain and caused massive downpours and the humidity rates to skyrocket. All of these factors combined to create a perfect storm of mold growth in Johnson. 

Johnson Hall was built in 1926 and was last refurbished in 2014 and 2015. Johnson was built  long before air conditioning was common, and adding air conditioning units to such old buildings can be tricky. ASHRAE, the world’s leading heating and air conditioning research society, has issued proposed standards that warn retrofitting older buildings can cause air circulation and humidity issues that create ideal environments for mold growth. A standard manual on mold in buildings issued by Oak Ridge National Laboratories includes a warning that vinyl wallpaper – the type of wall covering used in some dorms at Sewanee as well as at other colleges and universities – can trap enough moisture to allow mold to flourish.

Oliver said Facilities Management is planning to do a more thorough refurbishment at Johnson, “similar to what we have done at McCrady.”  According to Vice-Chancellor Robert Pearigan, McCrady underwent a “cosmetic renovation” last summer that cost nearly half a million dollars. 

Benton told parents and students that his department plans to perform renovations to Johnson to ensure that the mold growth is removed and proper precautions are put in place. The current plans are to remove all the carpet and the underlayment, clean and treat the subfloor, and install vinyl flooring. All wallpaper on interior walls that are in contact with exterior walls will also be removed, refinished, and painted. All of the mini-split air conditioners that cool each Johnson room will be thoroughly cleaned and have maintenance performed on them. New furniture will be installed that will replace the older furniture that may be moldy. Oliver, the University’s spokesperson, said Johnson will be reopened for students in January. 

The company Servpro has already done its job cleaning the mold in Johnson. Midway through the week-and-a-half remediation work, a Servpro worker asked by a passerby about the severity of the mold said, “It was pretty bad throughout but a couple of rooms were super bad.”

Late last month, some students moved into McCrady Hall; it had carpet removed, new vinyl flooring, walls repainted, student rooms and common areas professionally treated and cleaned, and the air quality tested in preparation for the Johnson Girls.

The issue of mold growth in older dorms is by no means unique to Sewanee.  

In 2018, the University of Tennessee at Knoxville had to evacuate 586 students from Laurel Hall in 2018 after mold was found in the building. According to Knoxville TV station WBIR,  remediating and renovating Laurel Hall and compensating affected students ultimately cost the university nine million dollars. UT Knoxville’s student newspaper,  the Daily Beacon, reported that the students who accepted the university’s rehousing options were refunded half of the semester’s room and board payments – an amount that the Knoxville News reported ranging from $3,375 to $4,356 per student. Those who opted not to move into university-provided alternate housing, in area motels, were refunded the entire semester’s housing cost. 

At Indiana University Bloomington, students sued in 2019 over mold issues in three dorms after it was reported that university officials “pressured staff physicians to avoid telling students that health issues may have been caused by mold in their dorms.” The university had to move 1,100 students to off-campus housing for the remainder of the 2019-2020 academic year, and Indiana Public Media reported that the University paid out more than $7 million to compensate affected students for health and personal property expenses. The students’  lawsuit was overturned on appeal because of the University’s $7 million compensation payments. 

Asked last whether Sewanee planned to offer compensation to Johnson residents, Provost Wilson told The Purple last Thursday that the University’s emergency management executive team had recently met and issued a final message to affected parents and students. 

“We have included in our final communication a message that we will accept requests from families related to travel to Sewanee to assist their students in Johnson Hall,” the provost wrote in an email to The Purple. “At the same meeting, we determined that we will not provide compensation for the disruption created by the relocation of students. We will, however, consider specific medical claims related to the mold situation in Johnson on an ad hoc basis.” 

For more information on the effect of Johnson’s mold problem on students and parents, read “Homelessness, Helplessness, and Health Scares: the Story of the Johnson Refugees.”