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Apartment residents angered by wet living
By AMY WIMMER © St. Petersburg Times, published October 1, 2000 SOUTH PASADENA -- During her first summer at Bethany Towers, June Adcock's furniture was sometimes so damp that the wetness seeped into her clothes when she sat. An Ace bandage tucked away in a drawer grew so green with mold that she had to throw it away. When she pulled out her old winter coat from the back of her closet, it also had turned green. "I slept in a wet bed for a year," said Adcock, 69. "It was very squishy." The following year, like so many other residents of the 30-year-old South Pasadena apartment complex, Adcock bought a dehumidifier for her apartment. Now the air still smells dank on most humid days of the year, and mildew is sprouting in the carpet, but the dehumidifier significantly cuts down the dampness when she runs it 24 hours a day. "My plants love it. They're surviving very well," said Adcock, whose doctor has urged her to move out of the complex. "They're doing better than I am." The ripe environment at Bethany Towers is nothing new. It's talked about at residents' meetings, card games and in the elevators that connect the building's 17 floors. Even the county health department is familiar with the problem at Bethany Towers, built in 1971 by Bethany Reform Church with low-interest loans from the federal Department of Housing and Urban Development. But as widespread and well-known as the problems are, residents are divided into three camps: One group believes the building owners and managers need to address the problem and make Bethany Towers a healthier place to live. Another group believes that as long as dehumidifiers are at work, pumping the water out of the air, residents have no reason to complain. Those in a third group fear they will lose their federal housing assistance from HUD if they complain about the air quality. "I can't understand why nothing has been said about this problem in all this time," said Corene Kern, a resident. Someone did say something to the Pinellas County Health Department. Stan Stoudenmire, an environmental specialist who handles south Pinellas County for the environmental health division, said he last visited Bethany Towers about two years ago. "What we do is we take complaints by individuals, and then we go out and look at indoor air quality," Stoudenmire said. "There's no enforcement, it's just a service." At Bethany, the department found a poorly maintained air conditioner, with mold growing on cooling coils and the insulation. "That system there at Bethany Towers is very old," he said. Bill Long, head of maintenance at Bethany, said he believes the mold problems are caused by the residents themselves. Residents turn on their air conditioners, then open their windows. That raises humidity in the building and eventually leads to mold problems, Long said. The building's management agrees. At residents' association meetings and in building newsletters, they urge residents to keep their windows down. "If you have your air conditioning set on 60 or 65 and you have the window open, you're going to have a problem," said Paulette Fors, the manager at Bethany Towers. Managers also urge residents to buy dehumidifiers if the air is dank within their apartments. But in a testament to how much water is in the air at Bethany Towers, residents say the dehumidifier's tank fills up as often as three times a day. In some cases, the daily output is almost 12 gallons. "You shouldn't need a dehumidifier if your air conditioner is working properly," said Stoudenmire from the health department. "You shouldn't need one if everything is sound and working properly." The air conditioning system itself is not the problem, Stoudenmire said. Bank of America Tower uses the same air conditioning system, but it has been well-maintained over the years. "If I could get a whole new system, I would do it," Fors said. "But the building cannot afford to buy a whole new system. If the residents would do as we ask and put the air conditioning on 72 degrees, we wouldn't have the problems." In the meantime, the apartments' reputation as a soggy environment continues to build. When South Pasadena resident Gloria Sanders worked as a housekeeper, she said she could always count on a steady stream of clients at Bethany Towers. "There was mold and mildew everywhere. I don't know how some of the people lived in them," Sanders said. "The clothes, the shoes, everything had mold and mildew growing on them. You could look down the hallway and see the mold on the baseboards." Now Sanders is property manager at an apartment complex just down the street, and even in her new business, former Bethany Towers residents make up a large part of her clientele. "I just put a "for rent' sign up," she said last week. "I know I'm going to get bombarded with people from Bethany wanting to move." Several Bethany Towers residents have moved into the apartments that Sanders manages, many of them for health reasons, she said. Sanders, whose apartments are regularly inspected by HUD, also questions why HUD has never cited the humidity problems at Bethany. The Times has requested HUD's inspection reports for Bethany Towers, but HUD officials have not yet made the documents available. Matilde Nelon, 68, moved out of Bethany Towers two months ago after living there for seven years. During her first summer there, she said she "noticed everything was turning green in there -- the furniture, leather shoes, luggage, picture frames." She said she threw away many of her things. By the next summer, she had a dehumidifier in her apartment. Ironically, when she moved, it wasn't because of the mold, but because of the dehumidifier. "I had to empty out the water at least two times a day," she said. "If I wanted to go see my kids who live out of state, I didn't have anyone to empty out the water." Torn between turning off the machine and letting the mold incubate, or feeling chained to her home, Nelon moved. Bob Ade, president of the Bethany Towers Residents Association, said the association has never taken a position on the mold problem. He, like a contingent of residents who agree with him, believes the problem is under control with the use of dehumidifiers, and he doesn't expect the building owners can afford a new air conditioning system. "We have an antiquated cooling system," Ade said. "It's not modern, it was installed 30-some odd years ago, and I can't do anything about it."
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