Fumigation success for California facility

Although hospital managers knew the technology had been used extremely effectively in other US buildings, this was reportedly among the first ever healthcare applications.

Officials at the Oxnard hospital facility, where I was working at the time, decided on the fumigation process in place of the traditional “rip and tear” method, where drywall is removed, the underlying surfaces cleaned with a solution to kill any remaining mould, and the area re-built, after hearing a CNN report that described how some facilities in the south of America had dealt with mould post-Hurricane Katrina. New Yorkbased Sabre Technical Services, which contracted to undertake the fumigation, had experience fumigating using chlorine dioxide to fight anthrax in government office buildings, and had also fumigated several facilities in the New Orleans area, including restaurants, homes, and businesses, for mould-related issues. While using the more “traditional” method would have entailed a complex project lasting another 5 to 6 years, the fumigation process allowed our team at St John’s to limit the corrective construction to under a single year, thus saving costs and time and, more importantly, keeping more hospital beds in service for the community. The process involved “tenting” the entire facility, and very substantially raising both the relative humidity level and temperature levels. As the hospital’s existing HVAC systems did not provide this level of humidification, other means of introducing it – namely three large steam generators – had to be employed. The chlorine dioxide gas was introduced throughout the facility using the existing HVAC systems, with several monitoring points established to verify that the humidity, temperature, and gas concentration levels were all at the correct levels to ensure an effective “kill” of the mould.

 ‘Thinking the unthinkable’