Ballpark's moldy roof home to potpourri of organisms
It's a roof..no, it's a petri dish...no, it's a pencillin factory. Actually, the roof on Minute Maid Park seems to be all of those things. Whatever the problem is, it's butt-ugly, and it's not getting any better.
Scientists sampling the thin, white plastic roof Sept. 12 described it as "slimy," and found evidence that some mold was growing and multiplying, not unlike the inside of a dormitory refrigerator.
"We had to first figure out what was up there," said Oliver Luck, the chief executive officer of the Harris County-Houston Sports Authority, which hired a private lab, at a cost of $5,000 to $10,000.
Earlier this year, the authority and the Houston Astros filed a warranty claim with the manufacturer, GenFlex Roofing Systems of Maumee, Ohio, saying the roofing material was advertised as resistant to microbial attack. At that time, it was unclear whether its attacker was bacteria, mold or algae.
"We are not 100 percent sure yet, but we feel fairly confident that the substance growing up there is covered by the warranty issued by GenFlex," Luck said of the initial test results. Further tests will determine the specific species and whether the growth is affecting the roof material.
GenFlex officials, who were unavailable for comment Thursday, have conducted their own testing and have offered to clean the roof for free.
But since May, the company and the Astros have wrestled with how best to restore the roof to its original white condition.
Experts contacted by the Chronicle to review the results of the sports authority's testing said the major-league question now is: What are the organisms feeding on?
If it's the roof itself, the Astros and sports authority may have the edge, said Michael McGinnis, a professor at the University of Texas Medical Branch at Galveston who maintains the Web site www.doctorfungus.org. But if the mold is flourishing on debris and dirt on the roof, which hasn't been cleaned since the stadium opened in March 2000, the Astros could be to blame. The baseball team leases the park for $3.4 million a year and is responsible for its maintenance.
"Those nutrients (the molds are feeding on) could be the plastic, or it could be a pigment in the plastic. It could be some type of glue," said McGinnis. "But if it turns out that it is gunk from Houston air, and dust and other kinds of things ... one could argue that if somebody cleaned the roof and eliminated the source of food for fungus, there would be no growth." During World War II, he said, molds growing on the lenses of cameras were found not to be feeding off the glass, but its coating.
Many of the molds detected on Minute Maid, identified loosely through a microscope, are as common in Houston as humidity, according to experts.
I now know WAY more about mold than I ever really wanted to. The sad thing about this is that the mold is visible to anyone flying over Houston or driving past Minute Maid Park on Highway 59. It would be nice if something would be done to take care of it. Minute Maid Park is a beautiful stadium that quite frankly looks atrocious at the moment.
