Hundreds of residents in Granville Towers in Chapel Hill, North Carolina, recently discovered that their air vents are filled with mold. Several people have gotten sick, and even more are frustrated with how intrusive the clean-up process is.
[121s]
DUNN1 [2s]: Yeah, so this is our fan.
[NAT SOUND OF INDUSTRIAL FAN] (15s)
DUNN2 [3s]: I can barely hear myself think over it.
[NATURAL SOUNDS OF DUNN COUGHING AND LAUGHING] (3s)
TRACK1: Bella Dunn has been sick for weeks. She lives in Granville Towers, a private UNC dormitory which recently ran into a problem with mold. She can see mold in the back of her room’s air vent – hundreds of other residents can too. Now, Granville’s management is scrambling to do something about it.
DUNN3 [10s]: They've also given us these fans that we’re supposed to leave on twenty-four seven. They're like big air filters. But no one leaves them on because they're too loud to, like, even think over.
TRACK2: Granville’s owners put the fans in to try to improve the air quality. Despite that, students there are still getting sick.
DUNN4 [10s]: And I feel like everyone around me kind of has the same symptoms. It's just like a lot of congestion, headaches. I went to New York for fall break, which is, like, heavily air polluted, and I felt better there.
TRACK3: The fans in Granville are only a temporary solution. Each resident is being forced to move out of their room so crews can clean the mold. Afterwards, they can’t return to their rooms for three days, so Granville has to pay for their hotels.
DUNN5 [8s]: I don’t understand why it’s happening now. Like, if it's this bad, how did they not know about over the summer and deal with it then? I don't want to leave my room, like, I'm paying to be here.
TRACK4: Many Granville residents agree, including her roommate, Ana Tan.
TAN1 [2s]: I think the fan is absolutely ridiculous.
TRACK5: She says it’s hard for students to move in the middle of the semester, and the deafening fans make studying nearly impossible.
TAN2 [10s]: Honestly, like, it's just unnecessarily loud. Like, I cannot hear myself think and it's, like, agitating. This is where we live. This is where we study and, like, do our homework.
TRACK6: She thinks the fan hasn’t made the air quality any better, so she usually keeps it off.
TAN3 [5s]: I feel like they stuck these fans in our room just to make it look like they were actively doing something.