Fort Gordon resident recounts five years of mold, health issues, more

2022-09-24 02:23:35 By : Mr. Scikr Appliances

Laurie Spivey lives on post at Fort Gordon — but not for much longer.

Balfour Beatty, the contractor in charge of family housing at the Army base, has moved her out of her initial home. After years of maintenance issues, the amount of mold in her on-base housing made it too dangerous for her to stay. She currently lives in temporary housing on the base.

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"We were planning to go ahead and leave at the end of our lease anyway, but the way it's going down now, it's like - whooof," Spivey said. "You gotta go, pretty much." 

While the Army has said it is investing in new barracks and family housing, old housing stock at Fort Gordon and elsewhere is causing ongoing issues 

Spivey has lived in Augusta since 2010 and at Fort Gordon since 2017, the latest in a string of Army bases she moved to with her enlisted husband about 30 years. It was the first base she lived at where the contractor, Balfour Beatty, was in charge of family housing.

"Everything gradually kept getting worse and worse and worse. Now, every time I called about anything, it takes forever for anything to get done," she said.

Over five years, Spivey said, she had issues with the sewer lines, unkept landscaping, hot water cutting out, water leaks, faulty wiring, and, most seriously, growing mold problems that finally made the house unfit to live in.

It was not only the mold, though, that was making her house unlivable. 

One bathroom had a non-functioning toilet, then the second bathroom toilet stopped working in August. A plumber came out and pulled tree roots out of the sewer line for the second toilet, according to Spivey and work orders she shared.

Spivey said her younger son, who is in the Marines, came to help her pack when she was told she needed to leave.

"So he's cutting off light switches in the house, right, he cuts off the light switch in the kitchen," Spivey said. "I hear BOOM! No power." 

According to Spivey, her son felt the electricity run through one hand and out of the other. 

"I was using a shirt just to cut the light switches off, because I was scared," she said.

Allegations that Balfour Beatty have not adequately kept up housing on base are long standing. 

In December 2021, Balfour pleaded guilty to fraud against the the United States from 2013 to 2019 following a Department of Justice investigation. Earlier this year, the Senate Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations, chaired by Georgia Sen. Jon Ossoff, heard testimony on Balfour management of military housing since the plea.

According to the subcommittee's report, Balfour runs more than 43,000 residences on 55 military bases, including 1,000 at Fort Gordon.

At Fort Gordon, the report notes that investigators found mold, carpets covered with pet hair, broken appliances, and significant water leaks that went unrepaired for months. Many instances of suspected mold were entered into Balfour's database as other kinds of work, such as routine maintenance. 

During the hearing, Richard C. Taylor, president of Facility Operations, Renovation and Construction for Balfour Beatty Communities, testified that there were no systemic issues at Fort Gordon and most Balfour residents are satisfied. He also testified that the issues that lead to the 2021 plea deal have been rectified. A spokesperson for Balfour confirmed to the USA Today network those are still the company's official positions.

"The homes at Fort Gordon are generally older buildings that were constructed by the military several decades ago," the spokesperson wrote in an email. "Maintaining them is our top priority, but issues do arise. However, maintaining a home requires a concerted effort by all parties."

Spivey pays $1,379 a month for the four-bedroom, two-bath house, which she currently shares with her son and daughter. Her husband is retired now and has since moved to Virginia.

Spivey shared a list of 52 work orders over five years from the rental management website; some for mundane issues such as annual inspections or light bulb replacements, others for far more serious issues.

In 2017, a work order lists water leaking in the mechanical room. 

"In the [mechanical] room, every so often it sounds like someone is pouring a pitcher of water," Spivey said. "So what we ended up learning to do in there, because they came a couple of times but of course they didn't do anything, is when we hear it we go and get mops and stuff to start mopping because we know it's going to run into the living room."

In 2020, a work order says sewage was coming up in the yard of the house, and multiple work orders list the hot water tank not working. Spivey said she started having respiratory issues in 2018, which she thinks are related to the mold.

"It kept progressively getting worse," she said.

This year, though, things started escalating.

On April 14, a maintenance person from Balfour came to look at the ongoing mold and told Spivey it was not as bad as it looked, she said. Later in the summer, another person came out to check on the grass not getting cut. Spivey had him take a look at the mold, too. 

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"He was like, 'Well, let's take a look and see,'" Spivey said. "They deemed the house unfit. It can't be fixed. The mold is too bad now. But in April, this guy said the mold wasn't as bad as I thought it was."

Balfour Beatty told Spivey she needed to move out, at least temporarily, to address the mold.

"Our primary concern is always the health and safety of our residents, and it is not correct to say that Ms. Spivey’s work order requests were ignored or that work undertaken was shoddy," a spokesperson for the company wrote in an email response. "There were a number of issues that affected Ms. Spivey’s house and, on July 28, we told her that in order to fix them we needed to temporarily displace her during the repairs."

Fort Gordon is not the only military facility dealing with mold.

On Sept. 12, Fort Stewart leaders held a stand down to address concerns from soldiers of mold in Army barracks.

Most of the issues are in the 30 Volunteer Army barracks on post, built between 1977 and 1984, which a news release noted failed to meet current standards. They are prone to mold because of outdated HVAC systems, but Fort Stewart also said that high humidity causes issues.

During a press conference held last week about the mold issue, Fort Stewart officials said all the barracks would be renovated by fiscal year 2035. They also said that no health issues related to the mold had been reported, either in barracks or from on-post housing, which is also run by Balfour Beatty.

Army officials at Fort Gordon shared results of a 2021 survey noting that satisfaction among tenants is improving. An accompanying fact sheet noted that the Army has implemented inspections of all barracks and family homes along with around-the-clock maintenance hotlines. 

Private companies are expected to earmark around $3 billion to improve housing over the next five years, while the Army is projected to invest about $15 billion over the next 10 years into funds used to renovate barracks. About a quarter of housing inventory will be renovated or replaced by fiscal year 2030, according to the fact sheet.

"Fort Gordon acknowledges there is no easy, instant fix to the current housing issues, but there are two key pieces already in play to improve Fort Gordon housing and our resident's experiences here: modernization and two-way communication," noted Fort Gordon Garrison Deputy Public Affairs Officer Anne Bowman. "Fort Gordon is set to begin building 76 new homes this fall. This new neighborhood construction will be called Pine Tree Terrace."

Balfour Beatty said they offered Spivey either temporary on-base housing for 60 days or an option to end her lease, get July rent back and receive reimbursement for moving off base.

Spivey said that taking them up on moving off base would have required them to move by Aug. 12, and she was not satisfied with the offer of a month's rent back and the return of her deposit. On Aug. 26, when she spoke to the USA Today network, she was still in the house. 

"They did say, 'Oh, we're going to pay up to $750 in moving expenses.' They did say we could use the old house for storage, because I wanted them to pay for my storage and my moving, you know, everything," Spivey acknowledged at the time. "So they did say that much, but the point is, we're still there." 

Balfour said that they did move her into temporary accommodations.

"She made it clear she did not want to be displaced," the Balfour spokesperson wrote on Sept. 15. "She finally decided to move and, until her move-out date, she is living in temporary accommodation on base provided at no cost to her."

On Sept. 16, Spivey said that Balfour had locked her out of the old house two nights previously, before apologizing and letting her family back in and then moving them to temporary housing. When her lease is up at the end of September, she plans to move off base. 

Spivey is glad to be moving out to a new home at the end of the month, but she said the issues she has experienced with Balfour are not unique. Most of the other military families she talks to also have issues with mold in their housing. Many of them, though, she thinks do not want to make waves.

"It needs to be known," she said.