Mold was first noticed in one of the Mac/Dav rooms during routine housekeeping. Although the mold was cleaned, the incident triggered a precautionary procedure to determine if the problem was contained to a single room or was more widespread. Wilson called in the Baxter Group—a company specializing in remediation of indoor environmental issues—to test rooms in the building and, when tests came back positive, began cleaning to address the mold.

The timing of the mold issue couldn’t have been worse: new students were scheduled to move in on Aug. 19. This meant that closing Mac/Dav—which had been renovated during the 2013-14 academic year—prior to move-in was a real possibility. But after all residence rooms had been cleaned, follow-up testing by Baxter came back negative and the decision was made to move forward with the move into Mac/Dav as planned.

About two weeks into the term, mold again appeared in Mac/Dav. The Baxter Group returned and tested on a large scale, covering 30 rooms throughout the residence hall, and included a look at the humidity levels in the building. The second half of the summer in Chambersburg had been particularly humid, and as the school year began, those conditions continued.

With the focus now on the HVAC system as the potential cause of the problem, the administration moved swiftly to bring in a number of the outside contractors associated with the residence hall’s renovation—including R.S. Mowery and Sons, the contractor for the renovation; Barton Associates, the engineering firm that designed the HVAC system; Noelker and Hull, the architect that hired Barton; Musser Mechanical, the company that installed the system; and Automated Logic Corp., which provided the HVAC monitoring system. Hagerstown Heating and Cooling was also brought in to provide an independent assessment. The group first met on Sept. 8 to begin developing a plan to fix the problem.

On Friday, Sept. 11, test results indicated conditions above acceptable levels in three rooms, with 60 percent of the rooms testing positive for lower levels of mold and humidity in the 70 percent range. Appropriate humidity levels should be around 50 percent. This result confirmed that the recently installed HVAC system was not properly controlling indoor conditions.

After consulting with the Baxter Group, Vice President for Student Development Mary Beth Williams made the call to shut down McElwain and Davison halls and relocate students to Rosenkrans, which had been taken offline pending renovations scheduled for spring and summer 2016. This represented a huge logistical undertaking, but to Williams the choice was clear. “Our students’ well-being is always our first concern, so moving our students before conditions could worsen was important. It was also obvious that work would need to be done to fix the cause of the mold and then properly remediate the area. So, clearing the space is the most efficient way to do that,” said Williams.

The Office of Student Development sent out an email to all Mac/Dav students by mid-morning to attend a meeting at 4 p.m. to discuss details of the move. Over the next six hours, the staff put those details into place in creating a plan to move 92 students. The plan included providing each student with cleaning materials and instructions to ensure that mold was not transported to Rosenkrans, clean storage bags to pack items and transportation for moving. The bulk of the planning was in reassigning students to rooms in a way that kept roommates and learning communities together as much as possible and setting up a system to check students into their new rooms.

“I can’t tell you how impressive it is that the student development staff was able to pull together the plan for relocating nearly a third of our residential students in less than a day,” said President Barbara K. Mistick. “We’ve been hearing good things from the students and look forward to having everyone settled into their new rooms.”

The administration is currently working with Baxter and the Mac/Dav renovation contractors to develop a plan to repair the HVAC system so that it properly controls humidity levels and to provide proper cleaning and remediation of the space to allow students to reoccupy the space at an appropriate time. “We expect the work to take the bulk of the semester in order to assure that we have absolutely cleared up the problem,” said Williams. “At that point we’ll look for an opportunity that allows us to move students back with the least amount of disruption.”

The current issues are not expected to impact the renovations set to take place in Rosenkrans.