The Air Force Says Social Media Helped Prompt Action To Clean Up Mold In The Dorms

Speaker 1: 00:00 Mold was found last month in nearly 2,500 Dora dorm rooms at joint base San Antonio Lackland, and it wasn't the first time the military faced criticism for housing conditions, but some advocates say it could be a turning point because air force members at the base took to social media to publicize the situation. Carson frame reports for the American homefront project. Speaker 2: 00:23 Facebook photos show dorm environments riddled with this stuff. Mold creeping up a uniform sleeve across a pillow and along the edges of a box. Right after the photos were posted, more than 500 airmen were temporarily relocated and workers ripped up carpet and treated the mold with bleach and other measures. Around 20 people have reported minor symptoms in connection with it. General John [inaudible] goes of Lachlan's 59th medical wing says mold usually doesn't cause serious complications in healthy people or the primary health concern with exposure to mold or allergy like symptoms. Uh, it'd be itchy, watery eyes, runny nose, sore throat. Those who have asthma could have an asthma flare, but it wasn't those health concerns that sparked the unusually quick response for military officials. It was the fact that airman posted pictures of the mold which went viral on social media. General Laura Lenderman commands the five-o second airbase wing, which performance logistics for joint base San Antonio. She says the mold is a familiar problem Speaker 3: 01:25 based on the environment where we live on the circumstances, the heat and humidity, the aging infrastructure. Well we didn't know was the extent of the problem and is that social media blast allowed us to understand the extent Speaker 2: 01:39 Lenderman points out that a dorm and campus improvement plan was already in the works, but she says the photos of the mold on social media have sped up the process. Speaker 3: 01:46 We were able just to implement pieces and parts of that plan as well as some other new ideas and provide momentum and a catalyst to the solutions. Speaker 2: 01:56 The military has long struggled to manage complaints about mold. In February, the Senate Armed Services Committee had a series of hearings which exposed problems that families were facing with mold in private housing on bases across the country. Lawmakers took military leadership to task over their lack of responsiveness and passed a defense budget with more housing protections. Kelly Rusko is with the national military family association. She says that although the majority of those hearings focused on private housing, they also revealed problems in dorms and other work buildings in bits and pieces. You would hear that privatized housing was just the tip of the iceberg and that when you looked at some of the barracks and you looked at some of the older work buildings that they were facing similar problems with mold. Raska says that photos of widespread mold at Lackland are helping to spotlight the problem and says the use of social media is telling the fact that they were posting the pictures on Facebook tells me that there may have been a breakdown in the reporting. Um, and will say that a lot of the focus has been on the housing. So this tells us that we need to expand some of these protections to make sure that it includes all installation facilities Speaker 2: 03:16 back at Lackland general. Lenderman says she's committed to transparency and is determined to rebuild faith in her wing. And if we've lost any amount of trust with our and because of the situation in the dorms, then that's my job is to rebuild that trust. In the weeks since Lachlan's mold problem exploded on social media base, leaders have used some of the same tools to respond. They created a mold remediation website to keep service members and the public updated. They've also documented their cleanup efforts across Twitter and Facebook. In San Antonio, I'm Carson frame. This story was produced by the American homefront project, a public media collaboration that reports on American military life and veterans funding comes from the corporation for public broadcasting. Speaker 4: 04:00 [inaudible].