Family abandons home after mold moves in
Couple believes water leak in A/C led to growth throughout the house

Sunday, June 24, 2001
By Neal Falgoust
Caller-Times

David Adame/Caller-Times

Linda Mercer blames mold growing in her Flour Bluff house for some of her family's ailments.
A suit against their insurance company goes to trial Nov. 5.

What began for Dwight and Linda Mercer as a simple renovation of their Flour Bluff house
turned into a flight from home, a nine-month exile and a fight with their insurance company.
All the Mercers wanted was to add a room and spruce up the property, but they soon found
themselves swirling in a storm of mold.

The Mercers' battle with mold began in February of last year. Linda's father, Robert Cloud,
wanted to move in with the family. They decided to build him a room and to do some other
renovations on the home that they had lived in for more than a decade.

The home had been a fixer-upper. The family rented it for several years before buying it in
1992, and since then made nearly $40,000 in improvements.

The Mercers hired Gutmann Turn Key contractors to repair a deck overlooking the water and
to enclose part of the garage, where Cloud would live. They expected the job to proceed in a
timely fashion.

During an inspection of the home, Brenda Gutmann, president of the contracting firm, found
some soft spots in the floor that separated the upstairs home from the downstairs garage.
What Gutmann found underneath the floor would change the Mercers' lives.

From beneath the floor

A leak in the air conditioning system had dampened the sub-floor and frame of the house.
Mold was growing in the moisture, feasting on the wood and paper in the floor. The mold also
had spread throughout the home's air conditioning system and had contaminated the family's
furniture, Linda Mercer said.

By March of last year, just a month after they found the mold, Dwight and Linda Mercer filed
a claim with their insurance company and hoped to have the mold problem resolved. Two
independent air conditioning contractors inspected the unit for the Mercers, and the insurance
company hired a third firm. All three concluded that there had been a leak, Linda Mercer said.
But the insurance adjuster was not convinced that there was a problem, Gutmann said.

"You can't smell it. You can't see it," she said. "So the insurance company goes in and says,
'There's nothing wrong with this.' "

'It doesn't cover this'

But something was wrong, the Mercers maintain. Dwight Mercer had respiratory problems,
and everyone in the house was feeling sick. "We all thought we had the flu," Linda Mercer said.
But they couldn't afford to do anything about their problems without help from the insurance company.
"We had the coverage, but for some reason they said it doesn't cover this," Linda Mercer said.

Then, in September - eight months after the family discovered the mold and after the family
hired a lawyer - the insurance company agreed to pay for relocation. The family left as soon
as it got word that the insurance company would pay. They took only their clothes. Photos of
relatives still hang on the moldy walls. Furniture that has not been sat on in more than a year
now shows signs of mold growth. And Jeremy Mercer's room looks like it was frozen in time -
a pair of overturned tennis shoes sits in the middle of the floor, the sheets on his bed still tousled.
"We assumed when we moved out that things would start moving and the work would be done
and we would be back home," Linda Mercer said.

Living in exile

Since then, the family has floated from a hotel to a rental property on Padre Island. They
had to buy an entire house full of furniture. Linda Mercer also had to adjust to a new life in
a strange place, a place where she feels uncomfortable. "I get scared out here," she said.
For now, the insurance company is paying only for the family's temporary quarters - not for
the furniture they needed to replace. There has been no agreement about who should pay to
fix the house. The family's case is set for trial Nov. 5, and Linda Mercer still hopes that she
will be able to move back home. She hopes the courts will be able to settle the issue.
"It's a big hope," she said. "But where else do you go? This is our home."

Contact Neal Falgoust at 886-4334 or_falgoustn@caller.com

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