Mold in the Barracks: Infrastructure or Discipline Problem?

Mold in the military barracks and military housing is not a new problem in the news. With the invention of social media, individuals share their concerns and frustrations with where they live – and that includes on military post. While Fort Liberty, formerly Fort Bragg, has closed some of its barracks down due to mold problems due to the age of the building (50+ years), Maj. Gen. James P. Isenhower III stated at the Association of the United States Army conference it wasn’t necessarily mold that was the problem. He said that soldiers needed to be better about “adulting.”

Maj. General Isenhower stated that the issue of mold growth is linked to humidity and discipline. “I’ve got it good at Fort Hood compared to Fort Stewart or Fort Liberty, where mold isn’t really a problem for us. I will tell senior leaders, ‘I don’t have a mold problem, I have a discipline problem,'” Isenhower said. “Because just the lack of humidity we’re not under the same conditions. We have had some mold problems, but that’s from some leaky pipes we didn’t discover until it was too late, and there’s a quick way to fix it. It’s acute. But at the end of the day, we still had young men and women who called the hotline and say, ‘I’ve got black mold in my shower, and it’s on the grout,’ because they haven’t cleaned it.”

Is It Really Just Humidity?

Blaming humidity and lack of cleaning isn’t a surprising response. In humid environments like Okinawa and the southeast of the United States, housing agencies and military unit leaders alike discuss that mold and mildew are commonplace, so watch out and prepare for it. In Okinawa, the market for dehumidifiers is strong – families often purchase one per floor of their home to combat the moisture levels. But the houses in Okinawa are also built with the local humid conditions in mind, with places in the economy with built-in drains in the bathroom so the dehumidifier could run continuously with a drainage tube down the drain. That is not to say the same exists in housing all across the southeast of the United States. For instance, the building company that built military housing in the Metro DC area, and California and Nevada utilized the same building strategies to build military housing communities in Tampa, Florida, and Albany, Georgia – but the environment is entirely different in these two areas, with family concerns of poor ventilation and humidity build-up leading to soft walls and flooring. The answer is to dehumidify, dehumidify, dehumidify – and wipe down moisture-prone areas like laundry rooms, kitchens, and bathrooms often to avoid the build-up of mildew and mold.

Not All Issues Are The Same

Black spots on grout in a shower are totally separate from black spots appearing on a soft wall or floor. When soft structures occur, it is most likely a pipe burst or water leak that needs to be addressed, not just the soft spots or black spots. The hotlines for barracks take all calls for mold issues or concerns. If the hotlines are inundated with calls for things like black spots on bathroom grout that can be wiped down, it delays the evaluation and addressing of serious problems.

How To Move Forward

Children learn primary education on cleanliness. They are learning to clean up after themselves, doing basic chores like washing dishes and folding laundry. These skills develop at home and in school. Living on your own in college or as a new recruit means all the cleaning falls on the individual. There are no maids cleaning individual spaces. Military leaders need to teach basic cleaning to avoid continued reports of mold and mildew or condensation leading to moist spots. The life skill and responsibility of cleaning these spaces provide better health and well-being for the individual, and thus, the unit is environmentally responsible and provokes self-sufficiency. These are skills learned in college or the military barracks after enlistment, and if they aren’t known, they can lead to health, career, and financial impacts in the future.

Basic skills like cleaning, cooking, and how to write a check have fallen out of favor, and busy parents working multiple jobs to keep up with inflation may need more time or ability to clean, outsourcing these jobs if possible. Perhaps if home economics wasn’t removed from the schools’ education repertoire? All things considered though, is this really just an “adulting” problem or a lack of accountability at the top? Tell us in the comments.