Evette Gilard’s skin itched so badly that it woke her one night in early 2019. When she searched her apartment, she discovered a thick rind of black mold in the threshold of her bedroom closet, and another in her hallway. There had been an apartment fire upstairs months earlier, and Gilard supposed that water damage from the firefighters had caused the mold. She knew that her little subsidized one-bedroom in Antioch, California, was not exactly a luxury condo, but now she feared for her health.
The next morning, Gilard told the property manager, who sent a maintenance man with a bleach-filled spray bottle. Knowing that bleach can spread mold on porous surfaces, she turned him away and appealed to the manager to give the problem more serious attention. Meanwhile, she was still living in the apartment, and her symptoms were getting worse. “My skin was changing, my voice was changing,” Gilard told me. “My hair was falling out.”