Stalactites of mold will hang from ceilings in New Orleans after water recedes, and the potentially toxic substance will cling to walls all over the city.
“It’s going to be the plague after the flood,” said Colorado State University researcher Doug Rice, who will help hotels, hospitals and other businesses clean up moldy buildings.
“It will impact every building that has gotten wet,” he said.
Rice is among dozens of scientists trying to make their way to Louisiana and Mississippi to study everything from emergency-response techniques to infectious disease and mold.
They are searching for rental cars and places to stay, hoping to collect what some call “perishable data” that could help during another disaster.
The University of Colorado’s Natural Hazards Center has begun to hand out small grants of a few thousand dollars to help researchers get into the field.
“We’re trying to learn about what makes organizations and communities able to organize, to be creative, resilient,” said Kathleen Tierney, director of the center in Boulder.
People’s memories of disasters are notoriously faulty, Tierney said. Days matter for researchers who want to understand just how special communication systems form, or how thousands of evacuees are organized into emergency shelters.
One social scientist wants to learn whether a new federal emergency system is leading to improved emergency response.
Another hopes to understand what happened to the poor, fishing-based community of Grand Bayou, south of New Orleans.
Rice said mold can get “out of hand” two to four weeks after a hurricane.
In healthy adults, mold can cause headaches, runny noses and shortness of breath.
Toxic molds are more dangerous and can cause memory loss, skin rashes and severe headaches, and can be deadly for HIV patients and others with immune-system deficiencies, Rice said.
Staff writer Katy Human can be reached at 303-820-1910 or khuman@denverpost.com.
