FAR ROCKAWAY, Queens — Weeks after floodwaters from Superstorm Sandy inundated his three-story home in Far Rockaway, Vern Clarke is pulling out the sheetrock and insulation from the walls of the first floor in a desperate bid to stop the spread of mold throughout the structure.
"I can't wait for anybody to do it," said the father of five. "The longer you wait, the worse the situation becomes."
Public health experts, volunteers and residents are sounding the alarm about mold that is rapidly growing in homes that were flooded by Sandy, saying it could pose a potential health hazard for families who have nowhere else to go.
And experts say the problem could get much worse as colder winter weather closes in and power is restored to more homes that haven't been fully dried out.
Jack Caravanos, a professor of environmental health at the City University of New York who has been visiting homes in the Rockaways to evaluate the problem, said the combination of heat and moisture are ideal conditions for a mold explosion.
"If the area is not completely dried out, mold will take off," he said. "And here's what's interesting with mold — it can cause asthma … It can exacerbate asthma … Being exposed to mold can make it worse and trigger an attack."
Greater NYC for Change, a 6,000-member activist organization that sprung from the 2008 Obama campaign, has started a petition on Change.org calling on government officials to deploy temporary housing — possibly including FEMA trailers or Red Horse Squadron tents — to help people get out of their flood-damaged, mold-infested homes. The petition has over 11,000 signatures.
There are currently few housing alternatives for those whose homes were damaged in the storm — the hotel vouchers provided by the city put Rockaways residents far away from their jobs, leaving them with an untenable commute, and shelters can be difficult environments for families.
Advocates said they are increasingly frustrated by what they see as willful apathy toward the problem of mold and the lack of housing alternatives.
Ret. Army Col. John Hoffman, who has been advising a number of emergency response groups in the Rockaways, said temporary housing would alleviate a number of problems.
“We are having issues distributing hot meals and getting medical care to people. Temporary housing would fix that, it would stabilize the community while homes are being rebuilt," he said. "In a lot of cases, the mold is not going to go away overnight. People will need places to live … These requests for temporary housing have fallen on deaf ears.”
State Sen. Joseph Addabbo, whose district includes the Rockaways, said FEMA and city officials are considering a plan to lease empty apartments to house residents who are either displaced or living in unsafe conditions due to the storm.
“Thirteen thousand residents in the Rockaways are without power,” Addabbo said on Friday. “There is no question the goal is to find temporary housing.”
He said FEMA trailers "aren't ideal" and that the federal agency has been trying to balance "cost and safety." “They are finding that area hotels are booked or have tripled rates," he said. "But there are hundreds of empty apartments in the Rockaways that FEMA is looking at.”
Clarke said FEMA sent someone to check out the damage to his home, but that his family was not offered housing assistance. "Well, the gentleman came in to do the interview," Clarke said. "There was mold already on the baseboard. He said, yeah, this is no place for the family and kids to be ... But we got denied for help."
The alternative — a hotel room — was also proving impossible to find. "There's no place," he said. "There's no place that could set up a family of seven."
Representatives of FEMA didn't return calls last week requesting comment on the situation facing families living in mold-infested homes.
A CREEPING PUBLIC HEALTH CRISIS?
In the days after the storm, St. Francis de Sales Parish, in the Belle Harbor neighborhood of the Rockaways, has become a refuge for storm weary residents.
In the lot across the street from the church, only a couple blocks from the beach where some houses were shredded and others were thrown off their foundations, tents have been set up to provide emergency assistance. During a recent visit to a heated tent where free hot meals were being served, dozens of dusty laborers, some with masks propped on their heads to eat, were gathered alongside residents.
Dennis Saleeby, volunteer field operations director for New York Resilience System, said he has seen people developing coughs and becoming ill and points to mold and other contaminants. “The particulates, the mold and asbestos are creating a toxic environment,” he said.
Saleeby and a number of other regular volunteers were shocked by recent comments made by the city's assistant health commissioner, Nancy Clark, to WABC-TV.
"We are monitoring emergency room visits and hospitalizations for illnesses, respiratory illnesses and to date we've not seen an up-tick but we continue to monitor," Clark said in the interview.
Saleeby said people who are living in conditions surrounded by mold aren’t likely to go to an emergency room.
“That is a very reactionary response to a health crisis," he said. "How many people in the Rockaways see private doctors, go to clinics or are too poor to go to the emergency room?”
Perhaps in a nod to the growing concern, the city’s Department of Health sent two staff members on a fact-finding trip to the Rockaways, a spokeswoman for the department confirmed. She would not provide details. Caravanos, who was with the team, said that the Occupational Safety and Health Administration also sent someone along on the trip Thursday.
Caravanos said it was difficult to pinpoint one health problem as being caused by mold. "Some people have irritation, upper respiratory respiration, cough, headaches, malaise … A mixed bag of symptoms that may or may not be mold specific but can be," he said.
The good news, he said, is that so far what he and others have seen amounts to "pretty much ambient mold" — such as penicillin and aspergillus — that can affect people who are susceptible, such as those with asthma and allergies.
But he said that more toxigenic molds, such as stachybotrys, could be looming on the horizon if homes are not dehumidified properly — and that could be more problematic. "Those molds will cause disease in just about anyone exposed," he said.
A growing body of literature exists on the health effects of mold, especially among vulnerable populations, including children and those people more susceptible to respiratory illnesses.
A 2004 study from the Institute of Medicine found that epidemiological studies "indicate there is sufficient evidence to conclude that the presence of mold … indoors is associated with upper respiratory symptoms, cough, wheeze, asthma symptoms in sensitized asthmatic persons…"
The association between mold and upper respiratory symptoms was a focus of concern in post-Katrina New Orleans, where the subject has been studied extensively.
And, as in New Orleans, activists and public health experts like Caravanos are moving aggressively to try to educate about the potential hazard of mold and the need to dehumidify buildings.
Alison Thompson, another volunteer coordinator and a longtime disaster responder who has been working out of a trailer on the St. Frances lot, said lessons from Katrina and from the toxic dust at the World Trade Center should be applied in the Rockaways.
“They’re saying it’s totally fine out here. It’s hard to believe that,” she said, adding that she had been visiting homes and finding a host of people complaining of respiratory problem.
One group that formed to respond to the problems caused by the storm, Respond and Rebuild, had planned to hold two mold clean-up community presentations in the Rockaways and Coney Island.
Caravanos was among the speakers, along with Guillermo Olivos, described in a flier as a “leader of mold remediation for recovery groups” following Hurricane Katrina, and Jolanta Kruszelnicka, described as an industrial hygienist on her LinkedIn page and as an adjunct professor at the Long Island University School of Public Health.
RESTORING HEAT, POWER; IGNORING MOLD?
In recent days, Mayor Michael Bloomberg has been touting the city's Rapid Repair program, set up by his office, to provide free emergency repairs to help residential property owners affecting by the storm to restore heat, water and electricity.
"NYC Rapid Repairs teams will visit any storm-damaged house that is structurally sound, provide a free assessment of what needs to be done to get basic services restored, and then do the work for free," he said in his weekly address on Nov. 25.
But the program doesn't deal with mold. “They are taking out sheetrock and other flood damaged material, but they are not in the mold removal business," Addabbo said.
Caravanos said he and other public health experts were trying to change that. "They are leaving you with a moist house ready to ferment," he said of the Rapid Repairs program.
The mayor's office didn't respond to an emailed request for comment about mold remediation efforts and the Rapid Repair program.
But without city or federal help, landlords and homeowners are left to deal with the mold problem themselves. But often landlords aren’t equipped to deal with mold damage and, in some cases, the damage is so extensive residents shouldn’t expect to be back in livable apartments anytime soon.
There are also plenty of people out there looking to make a quick buck and ready to pose as mold remediation experts — a possibility made easier by the fact that there is no state licensing requirements for anyone to say they are.
In the immediate impact of Hurricane Sandy, Brandon D’Leo and the surf club he works out of in Queens had a distinct purpose: help as many people as possible.
“We got together and just sent people through the neighborhood to canvas and find out what people needed," he said. “We sent out crews of volunteers to dig people out and do demolition.”
Now D’Leo says “things have really changed” — but not for the better. Thanks to long festering mold in houses that have been without heat for weeks, it isn’t as simple as sending volunteers out to tear out a water-soaked interior. “At about three-and-a-half weeks in, we couldn’t send people into those conditions any more because of the mold," he said. "It is just irresponsible."
D’Leo said he is acting more as an intermediary — sending volunteers to organizations that are properly outfitted to handle toxic mold.
Clarke, the resident who had stripped his first floor to deal with the mold, said it had been two weeks since a crew from the Rapid Repair program had come by.
In the meantime, as he awaits their return, he said he is going to have to pull out the kitchen cabinets and the stove and keep working toward fixing up his house so that his family can get back a sense of normalcy.
"Everybody is just trying to hang in there," Clarke said. “It's not a comfortable situation. It's not a happy situation. it's just a situation where you're making things work day by day."
Photograph of paid sick leave rally by William Alatriste.
NEW YORK — In the late 1970s and early 1980s, when Democrat Tom Cuite was at the helm of the City Council, he made sure the city's landmark gay rights bill was killed in committee nearly a dozen times.
I was involved in the 50-group, all-volunteer Coalition for Lesbian and Gay Rights at the time, and we demanded the sponsors of the Council bill force a vote on it, even if the bill might lose, to get them on the record.
When the speaker of the City Council refuses to schedule a vote on a bill, the lead sponsor has the right to file what is known as a discharge motion with seven others to bring it to the Council floor for a full vote by their colleagues.
But it might as well be the nuclear option, because most sponsors and advocates run for the fallout shelters when asked about whether they would consider standing up to the leadership.
“Cuite punished members who defied him by going so far as to withhold mail from them, but the ones who stood with us believed civil rights were more important than personal perks,” said Allen Roskoff, who worked on the gay rights bill since it was the first in the nation to be introduced in 1971 at the behest of the Gay Activists Alliance.
No discharge motion is known to have passed the Council, with some members in past Councils claiming that even though they supported the legislation they were voting no because they opposed bypassing the committee system.
The gay bill finally passed in 1986 when Peter Vallone, Sr., became majority leader and let it go to the floor despite his personal opposition to it in a deal he made with Council Member Robert Dryfoos, a supporter of the bill, who betrayed the Manhattan delegation to vote for Vallone as leader over Sam Horwitz, forever earning Dryfoos the nickname “Benedict Bob.”
Today, it is difficult to see how such a coalition of activists and Council members might come together to force a vote on the bill that would require some employers to grant sick leave to employees with Speaker Christine Quinn implacably opposed to the legislation. After all, this Council has never used a discharge motion under her tenure.
The sick-leave bill (Intro 97-A) has a more than veto-proof majority of 36 City Council co-sponsors – just 34 are needed for a two-thirds override of the mayor’s promised veto of the bill. But the legislation has languished without a vote because of the opposition of one member, Quinn, and the refusal of her members to contradict her. She shelved the bill in 2010, telling the New York Times it “threatens the survival of small-business owners.” The 36 sponsors didn’t say boo to her blocking the bill and, while some of the advocates wailed at the time, none demanded a discharge motion.
While Quinn does not have the legal power to stop a bill from coming to the floor, her fellow Council members have been astoundingly silent — or evasive — when it comes to discussions about asserting their right to bring a discharge motion.
I asked a few Council members at an August 22 religious rally for the sick paid leave bill on the steps of City Hall why they weren’t using the power of discharge.
Councilman Robert Jackson dodged the question. “It’s not my bill,” he said, though he is a sponsor. He added that it “hasn’t come up” in their strategy meetings to get the bill passed.
Would there be consequences for him if he did support a discharge motion? “I don’t know,” he said.
Councilman Jumaane D. Williams (D-Brooklyn), considered one of the more independent members of the Council, said, “I don’t have an answer. It’s a good question. But nobody’s asked us for that.”
Councilman James Sanders, Jr. (D-Queens), who chairs the economic development committee in which the bill has been heard and stalled, said he could not give me a “good reason” why there has been no committee vote and that any request for discharge would have to come “from the prime sponsor,” Councilwoman Gale Brewer.
At the same rally, Brewer would not answer questions about whether she would consider using her power to bring a discharge motion.
“I’m going to work with the leadership to get a bill,” she said, though would not say whether the bill would change before it goes to a full Council. “We are going to get a bill,” she emphasized.
Critics fear that as Council members negotiate the bill, it will be tempered, much in the same way that living wage legislation was made more palatable for the business sector before it was allowed by Quinn to come to the floor.
Roskoff, a longtime critic of Quinn’s leadership and closeness to Mayor Bloomberg, issued a statement on behalf of the Jim Owles Liberal Democratic Club, where he is president, demanding that Brewer bring a discharge motion on the bill or for supporters of the bill to select a new lead sponsor who will.
“If Council members are not willing to stand up to the speaker for what they allegedly believe in, we might as well dispense with having a City Council entirely and save the city a lot of money,” he wrote in an August 27 statement.
Most advocates for the bill would not answer direct questions about whether the option of demanding a discharge motion has even been discussed.
“At this point, we have not viewed it as a viable mechanism. That’s what I’m saying in August. It may not be our position in two months,” said Martha Baker, a leader of the New York State Paid Family Leave Coalition.
Instead, Baker said they were “trying very hard” to work with Quinn.
“She has the power to bring the bill to the floor. History tells us that discharge is not usually the most effective way,” Baker continued.
Groups such as the Working Families Party and the Community Service Society have been bombarding their members with pleas to call on Quinn to schedule a vote, but in the face of her continued resistance to the legislation they are not demanding that Council members bring the bill to the floor themselves through discharge.
“It is time for Speaker Quinn to heed the calls coming from all directions, and bring paid sick days legislation to the floor for a vote,” said David Jones, president of the Community Service Society in a release, but his group would not provide their stance on a discharge motion.
Working Families also would not answer the question on discharge, emailing this statement: “The proposal has been crafted in consultation with small business owners, and we're asking Speaker Quinn to allow a vote on the City Council floor. Speaker Quinn has a long history as an advocate for working people and as a supporter of public health, and we're optimistic that we'll get a vote on the floor, with her support.”
While Quinn’s office said that no discharge motion has been brought during her tenure, Councilman Charles Barron (D-Brooklyn) said he was part of a group that gathered the signatures from sponsors to bring a discharge motion on a bill relating to voting machines and the speaker’s office responded by releasing the bill from committee.
Barron seems to be alone among Council members in his willingness to take Quinn on over her leadership; he said he has paid for it by being removed as chair of the council committee on higher education.
“There is no democracy in the City Council,” he said. “It is the dictatorship of the Speaker” — something he knows something about as the man who hosted a Council reception for Zimbabwean dictator Robert Mugabe, though Barron regards him as a “liberator” — which indeed he once was.
“Members are afraid to assert their own power,” Barron said of his colleagues. “They fear the speaker who they give too much power. Nothing in our rules says that she controls capital money and expense money, but they let her determine how much we get. Funds are not distributed based on the need of impoverished communities. They go to the Council members who go along, get along, and do the speaker’s bidding. She determines what committee assignments we get and whether we get to chair a committee.” He said he has his own way of bringing resources to his district by negotiating directly with city agencies.
Of the advocates who are not demanding discharge, Barron said: “All of them are afraid to confront the speaker because they have other deals in the pipeline.”
Barron wishes his colleagues would stick together on issues that are supposed to be their highest concerns, particularly matters of economic justice. “She can’t punish all of us. If the majority of us said no to her, we win.” He “guarantees” the sick-leave bill “will be watered down the way the living wage bill was.”
Indeed, despite the fact that the bill as written has 36 co-sponsors, Brewer has announced that she is negotiating changes in it. In her latest email newsletter, she wrote: “We are working to address the concerns of business owners who have legitimate concerns about the language in this bill.”
Mayoral politics are a factor here. “It is obvious to us that from what I read, there are powerful interests in the city who would support the speaker for mayor and don’t support this bill,” Baker said. “That has to have an effect. Other folks who are running for mayor — de Blasio, Stringer, Liu, Thompson — everybody appears to be in support except the speaker”
Several Council sponsors of the bill who I have often gotten comments for my stories in the past would not respond to calls for comment on the question of bringing a discharge motion — including Daniel Dromm (D-Jackson Heights), Rosie Mendez (D-Lower East Side) and Daniel Gorodnick (D-East Side). None of them returned calls or emails.
When I reached out to Quinn’s office, I received no response to the charges of her critics.
While the New York Post and New York Daily News editorialize that Quinn should hold firm in stopping the bill, The New York Times wrote that Brewer and Quinn “should be able to find a workable compromise” on the bill that they say Quinn supports “in principle.” The fact that 36 sponsors will not bring the bill up for a vote on their own raises not just the question of their independence as representatives, but whether they were just putting their name on a bill that they do not truly support and were counting on Quinn to kill or amend.
“It is time for all City Council members to stand up for what they say they believe in and pass this bill intact. A discharge motion is rarely used in the Council, but it is the only hope the bill has of passage in its current strong form,” Roskoff said.
___
Andy Humm is the co-host of the weekly Gay USA cable TV show, a contributor to Gay City News, and a former city Human Rights commissioner.
NEW YORK — Many who oppose requiring businesses to give paid sick days to workers — among them Speaker Christine Quinn, Mayor Michael Bloomberg and industry groups — have been arguing that to do so in today's enfeebled economy would be too much to ask of employers.
But there is a public health case for paid sick leave that has gotten much less attention, and has been bolstered by recent studies.
Nancy Rankin, a researcher with the nonprofit Community Service Society, said there is a good reason opponents of the bill are focusing on economic arguments.
"The opposition realizes they can't win on the public health issue. It's so obvious that it has merits … They are not even fighting on it," she said.
In recent months, advocates have been campaigning for a City Council bill that they say would give tens of thousands of mostly low-wage workers paid sick days off.
Originally introduced by Councilwoman Gale Brewer in 2009, Quinn shelved the bill a few months later, citing the torpid economy at the time. Now it is back in a much modified form, but Quinn has continued to refuse to bring it to a vote on much the same grounds.
“With the current state of the economy and so many businesses struggling to stay alive, I do not believe it would be wise to implement this policy, in this way, at this time," she said in a statement in response to a letter urging a vote on the bill that was signed by feminist author Gloria Steinem and about 200 other influential political, labor and public health leaders.
According to the Bureau of Labor statistics, as of 2010, 61 percent of workers in the private sector had paid sick leave, while 89 percent of state and local government workers did as well.
There is currently no federal law that requires companies to provide paid sick leave, and workers at companies with 50 or more employees can get 12 weeks of unpaid leave under the Federal Family and Medical Leave Act.
The Healthy Families Act, introduced into the House of Representatives, would set a "national standard" for paid sick days.
Meanwhile, advocates at the local level have successfully pushed laws to pick up the slack, including in San Francisco and Washington, D.C.
The problem of workers going to their jobs while sick was highlighted during the 2009 outbreak of H1N1, also known as as the swine flu.
In a study published in the American Journal of Public Health in January, researchers sought to find out if such factors as the inability to take time off from work, the need to take public transportation and crowded households made people more likely to contract H1N1.
The study was based on a sample survey of over 2,000 adults through in early 2010. Responses were sought on questions including: "If public health officials declared that it was necessary for people to stay home from work and school, how difficult would it be for you to stay home from work for 7-10 days?"
The conclusions of the researchers might not be so surprising — finding that social factors did indeed contribute to a higher number of people getting sick from flu-like symptoms during the 2009 pandemic.
Especially affected were Hispanics, who were not only found to be at greater risk of exposure because of social factors but also to be unable to get medical help.
"These facts have implications for policies: there is a need to provide better access to vaccines, drugs, and culturally competent health care providers," the authors of the study wrote.
A separate study by researchers at the Centers for Disease Control that was published in July found that workers without sick leave were more likely to skip going to a doctor for preventive screenings, such as mammograms, Pap tests or endoscopies. The study was based on data from the 2008 National Health Interview survey.
Whether a person obtained preventive care was determined largely by the jobs they do, the authors said, writing:
A person’s occupation is the source of some of the most critical elements determining their health and well-being. And in the United States, access to these benefits is largely determined by the type of occupation. The percentage of workers with access to paid sick leave is lowest among service workers, workers in construction and maintenance, transportation workers, and part-time workers, and highest among managers and professional workers. This occupational structure disproportionately affects women who are more likely to be low-wage and part-time workers."
In a third study published this year, workers who had paid sick leave were found to be "28 percent less likely overall to suffer nonfatal occupational injuries."
In a post on the CDC's blog, the authors of the study wrote that they had concluded that "access to paid sick leave might reduce the pressure to work while sick out of fear of losing income."
Rankin and other advocates see it as a sign of hypocrisy that the mayor is seen as a pioneer of innovative public health policies but is against paid sick leave, given the research to support it.
"It's a good time to do it," Rankin said. "It's a time when workers are hurting, and so they are really worried about hanging on to their jobs, and that forces them to come into work sick. And it's something that would help workers."
The city's Department of Health, which is the Bloomberg administration's chief cheerleader of policies including the ban on trans-fats and the proposed regulation to limit the size of soda containers, declined to comment for this story.
In a roundtable discussion organized by CSS in April, some business leaders have agreed that it is better if workers avoid going to their jobs while sick, but were opposed to the Council's bill.
"People should never ever have to fear getting fired or getting punished for calling in sick. And we, like the rest of you, do not want to see any employee going to work when they’re ill. It’s just a question of how we get there," said Jack Friedman, representing the Five Borough Chamber Alliance.