A fire station responsible for covering some of Wichita’s most densely populated neighborhoods will sit empty for the foreseeable future — until crews can fix an extensive mold problem in the building.
City officials said they’ve developed a plan to keep up response times in the impacted areas of east Wichita. That plan has the support of the firefighters’ union.
But union officials caution that the problems at the now-empty Station 15 are just the beginning.
Firefighters from Station 15 at Lincoln and Rock Road evacuated their building on Sunday.
Wichita Public Works staff had been to the station last week to replace 90 water-damaged ceiling tiles throughout the station. The tile replacement was part of a facility remediation plan for the station after air sampling completed this winter showed four types of mold: Aspergillus, Penicillium, Cladosporium and Stachybotrys.
The Center for Disease Control and Prevention lists the first three mold genera as among the most common. Stachybotrys is black mold. Some species of all four can trigger allergic reactions, asthma attacks, eye and respiratory irritation. Some species can result in invasive infections and more serious illness.
Ted Bush, the president of Local 135 of the International Association of Firefighters, said he visited Station 15 late last week to see how remediation was going. He said he saw a city Public Works employee on a ladder in the station’s kitchen, working on the ceiling.
“He peeked down and asked me, ‘Hey man, have you got any masks? This is pretty bad up here,’” Bush said. “I said no. He didn’t have a mask.”
Bush got a call later that weekend from a firefighter at Station 15. The firefighter said his eyes, nose and throat were burning and that he felt sick.
Bush said the firefighter and other crew members cleaned up particulates left from the remediation process. The substance created a bad smell that made it difficult to sleep in the bunk room and started irritating the crews’ eyes right away.
The call to close the station ultimately came from the department’s medical chief, Bush said.
“It was the right decision, and he was bold in doing it,” Bush said of the medical chief. He added that he couldn’t think of a time when a fire station has shut down in Wichita. “He [the medical chief] was brave in … saying, ‘We can’t do this, we’re going to make sure the building is safe.’”
Bush said that the firefighters’ union has been raising the alarm about facility issues, livability in the stations and staffing for the better part of a decade.
“What concerned me is Station 15 was one of the worst ones in town,” Bush said. “I thought, ‘We have got to look into this.’ We cannot have our buildings making our firefighters sick.”
City Manager Dennis Marstall told City Council members during a recent meeting that the city received reports of “a black substance” at Station 1 in September. City officials hired a vendor who completed an environmental study of all 20 fire stations and the regional training facility.
The contractor made notes on what they saw around each station, the results of air sampling both inside and outside of the stations, and the findings of a tape lift test — where tape is used to collect a sample of visible mold for testing.
At 18 of the 22 facilities, the surveyor called out multiple areas of visible mold. Mold was found in station kitchens, bathrooms, bunk rooms and locker rooms. At seven of the stations, air sampling captured active mold spores. Black mold was found in stations 11, 13 and 15.
Public Works Director Gary Janzen said when the results were delivered to the city in January, a new problem arose.
“There’s no thresholds, there’s no guidelines, there’s no recommendations that if you find mold, what do you do?,” Janzen told the council. “What’s the risk? What’s the level? What’s significant? When should you consider occupancy or not? That’s one of the challenges we’re working through.”
Janzen said that the city began work to remediate mold throughout the facilities in October, even before the results were delivered to the city. He said the city is now working to hire an environmental hygienist that will give the city a second opinion on the mold risk and how to prioritize cleanup.
The director said there’s more work to be done on how the city handles repairs and mold issues. He said that staff “indicated seeing more insulation than expected” when working on the ceiling tiles at Station 15.
“The long and short of that is, I don’t think we did a very good job of containing that material when the ceiling tiles were replaced,” Janzen said. “We will fix that going forward, and we have put a temporary hold on replacing other ceiling tiles at other fire stations until we get that process right.”
Janzen said he thinks what likely irritated the firefighters on Sunday was insulation materials and dust, not mold. The mold report suggested the probable source of the mold spores in Station 15 was the building’s 1960s-era duct work. Heating and cooling for the building is run through ducts that create condensation and a moisture-rich environment for mold.
Janzen said the city plans to install mini-splits — ductless, wall- or ceiling-mounted heat pumps designed for individual rooms — over the next three weeks and cap off the existing duct work.
“We’re still moving forward with remediation as soon as we can on all the remaining facilities,” Janzen said. “We’ll get the recommendation of that environmental hygienist as quick as we can to make a determination on safety for our firefighters — because that is obviously paramount to everything that we’re doing.”
Until then, the crews from Station 15 are split between Station 20 at Pawnee and Greenwich and Station 9 at Kellogg and Edgemoor. Bush said the stations are making use of extra beds in the bunk rooms to help accommodate the Station 15 firefighters.
Council members said they were disappointed in the need to evacuate the station and are concerned about firefighter safety.
Vice Mayor Dalton Glasscock said a whistleblower sent him the mold report over the weekend as he learned that Station 15 was being shut down. He asked why Janzen or Fire Chief Tammy Snow didn’t alert the council to the mold issues sooner.
Both Glasscock and Bush said there were reports of mold in city fire stations documented in 2018.
“I was not sent from city staff the reports received in January that then led us to beginning a remediation plan, that then led us to this incident,” Glasscock said. “I don’t think that I have been informed of that any step along the way.”
Janzen said his department was trying to work on remediating the mold as quickly as possible. Snow said it’s not been department practice to notify the council of all the facility reports for repairs.
Glasscock said he didn’t believe hiding the report was intentional and said the council was just focused on getting Janzen and Snow the funds they needed to fix the stations. When asked if he had a total price tag or timeline for remediation of the department, Janzen said he didn’t have a firm estimate.
“Resources are a challenge,” Janzen said. “We need to replace the HVAC system at Station 1. The cost for that alone is $1.1 million and we’ve been putting funding together for that for the last several years…I hope not to delay that anymore, but we’re going to first and foremost take care of as much of this as we can.”
The mold report lists a target remediation date for each of the stations. Work on 11 of the stations isn’t set to begin until December.
“I don’t want to blame anybody here,” Bush said. “There is some blame, but it’s multifaceted. So instead of trying to get through that, let’s figure out what happened, let’s fix it and let’s move forward.”
