Healthy Indoors Magazine
Issue link: https://hi.healthyindoors.com/i/1489776
28 | December 2022 Carl Grimes Continued from previous page Carl Grimes Carl Grimes, HHS CIEC, has direct experience consulting with those who experience complaints indoors and as a leader in the industry intended to fix those causes. Because he also originally ex- perienced the harm in his personal life, he has a unique perspective and approach for understanding and communicating the complica- tions and confusions between them. He is past president of IAQA, vice president of practice of ISIAQ, and chaired the IAQA Healthy Home committee that wrote the Healthy Home Assessment Prin- ciples course. He has served on committees writing the original S520 mold remediation standard, medical practice parameters for allergists, official policy position statements for ASHRAE, plus sev- eral peer reviewed and published papers. He's currently director of healthy homes for the Hayward Healthy Home Institute and Hay- ward Score in Denver, Colorado; and vice chair of ASHRAE TC1.12 on building dampness, and chair of ASHRAE's SGPC10 commit- tee Interactions Affecting the Achievement of Acceptable Indoor Air Quality. You can reach him by email at grimes@haywardscore.com. ments to the S520 public review will be more than just an opinion. That they will have their supporting information which is organized in a transparent verifiable man- ner. I further hope the S520 consensus body will either find a way to legitimately maintain S520 as the guardrail of the mold remediation industry or replace it with a new standard with a new name – if it has as a significant improvement that is inde- pendently validated. rently non-compliant players in the mold remediation industry. That is my opinion, and each reader will have their own. Be- cause opinions by themselves are not open for discussion they can't be discussed in any meaningful or productive way. That's why I have included specific concerns along with the methodology of my reasoning. The methodology of my reasoning is certainly open for discussion, should be discussed, and I welcome it. My hope is that the com- moval to the treatment protocol is offered to correct that flaw, then it is an unneces- sary task with unnecessary cost. Remove the Condition 3 and Condition 2 mold first, as S520 requires, and there's nothing left to denature or kill. S520 Flaws S520 has a weakness, the lack of Post Re- mediation Verification (PRV) to verify that removal is sufficient to prevent health effects. But S520 makes no claim about health effects. The S520 is a procedural standard for the removal of Condition 3 and Condition 2. It is left to others to ad- dress the health risk of types of molds, con- centrations of mold, or the total amount of mold exposure. The logic that the lack of presence is also the lack of exposure is by definition and stands alone. The Second Concern My second concern, and perhaps the most dangerous, is that the economic consider- ations and political pressures will be too powerful for the consensus body to resist. The result might then be a document with the same S520 title and ANSI accreditation, but with procedures that have "jumped the guardrails" so to speak, resulting a different "road" to a different purpose which is no longer the guardrail to the mold remedia- tion industry. In which case, once the guard- rails are gone, the only parachute available is the process of a formal ANSI appeal. As I said above, I am offering my opinion that S520 may not be able to survive the challenges possibly coming from the cur- * Environmental and Occupational Respiratory Disorders, Vol 117, Issue 2, P326-333, February 01, 2006, Bush, R., et al, The medical effects of mold exposure.https://www.jacionline.org/article/S0091-6749(05)02591-1/fulltext