By Bruce Stewart, CIH, ROH, Senior Vice President, Pinchin Environmental Limited
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| Mould has been found in other places besides the Newmarket courthouse. Here workers wearing sophisticated protection gear strip mould from a portable building. Photo - Pinchin Environmental |
Imagine you were driving north through Newmarket, Ontario, in early November 2000, along Yonge Street. On the west side of Yonge, you might see over 30 construction trailers and portable offices, located next to a modern four storey building, surrounded with construction hoarding. Given the number of trailers and the fresh appearance of the building, you might conclude that this was a construction site for a large new building. You would be wrong. For life has been turned upside down at the Newmarket provincial courthouse.
The workers in the temporary trailers are not construction workers but lawyers, judges and other staff of the central courthouse for York region. And in the courthouse, built in the 1970s, you would find not judges and lawyers but demolition workers wearing respirators and disposable coveralls, labouring inside carefully maintained containment barriers.
In this project, managed by Profac Facilities Management, with Pinchin Environmental as the consultants, almost all of the walls and ceilings of this 165,000 square foot building are being removed to eliminate every trace of mould growth. Along with the workers are representatives of the Ministry of Labour and the regional Public Health office, under whose watchful eye the work is proceeding. This year has been a very trying time for the staff and managers of the York regional courthouse, and all because of mould growth.
The concerns over mould growth in buildings are not confined to the Newmarket provincial courthouse. There have been many press reports in the past few years of the massive efforts by school boards to correct mouldy conditions, especially in portable classrooms. In the province of Ontario alone, 40 million dollars was granted last year to compensate school boards for their extraordinary expenses to correct mould contamination. And in British Columbia, there have been many reports of leaky condominiums and the impact on the health and pocketbooks of their owners.
Most of us would consider the health hazards of mould in buildings to be a new concern. However, there are warnings regarding mould, back at least to the time of Moses. Since 1995, many provincial occupational health and safety authorities, including British Columbia, Saskatchewan and Ontario, have published guidelines for the assessment and control of mould in buildings.
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