You’re not the only one with water dripping from window and door frames. Leaks are ubiquitous now, and roofers can barely handle the calls begging for help.
“I’ve been doing this 31 years and have never seen anything like it before. It’s just incredible,” Jimmy Cossette, vice president of William Fletcher Roofing Co., said of the volume of calls coming into his office.
The snowfall is over, but in its wake there’s a lot of ice damming. Sun on the roof and heat in the house melt roof snow, but the water has no place to go because the gutters are clogged with ice. “It’s like concrete in the gutters,” Cossette said. So the water slides down between the house exterior and walls, and seeps through seams around windows and doors.
“There aren’t many answers right now because we can’t see the rooftops yet,” he said, but crews will get to work repairing roofs as soon as snow mounds around houses disappear and it’s safe to put up ladders.
In the meantime, you are advised to start thinking about mold growth inside the walls as a result of the leaks.
Molds are everywhere. Outside they play an important role in the natural ecosystem by breaking down dead organic matter such as leaves, but indoors mold is unpleasant, a nuisance and even a potential health risk.
There are thousands of different types of mold, and they all thrive in moist, humid conditions such as:
– Ceilings and walls beneath leaking roofs
– Inside ductwork of central heat/air conditioning systems
– Leaky appliances or water pipes
– Bathrooms with little or no ventilation
– Clothing drier exhaust fans that vent under or into house
– Basements and garages with walls abutting below-ground soil
It can be simple and inexpensive to get rid of mold you can see. It’s trickier and more expensive to determine whether mold is growing in interior wall cavities or ducts, which is the situation you must look for now. It’s advisable to seek professional services from an indoor air quality testing and remediation company when the snow is gone.
Hardware stores like Strosniders (in Bethesda, Potomac and Silver Spring) and Home Depot (64 locations within 50 miles of metro D.C.) carry many over-the-counter products in spray, liquid and pellet form that will eliminate indoor mold. And, the paint sections of hardware stores carry exterior, moisture-absorbing products for siding, roofs, driveways and all the places that don’t get sun. You can also pick up a “Do It Yourself Mold Test Kit” with easy-to-follow instructions, if you suspect but aren’t sure mold is lurking.
The critical thing, said Andrew Chestnut, assistant manager of housewares at Strosniders in Bethesda: “If there’s mold in your home, you must get rid of it AND fix the water problem that caused it. It’s absolutely essential to eliminate the water source. If you clean up the surface but don’t resolve the water problem, the mold WILL come back.”
