much like kevin truduos book ,things the government dosnt want u to know about . its all a scam ,scam scam ,playyin on everybodys hyped up fear .gets results ..

Her husky voice is due to her chronic smoking for over 20 years, not the croup. I am in the medical profession and croup might but does not always does leave a recovered patient with a husky voice. Tell her to quit smoking like a fiend!

asking for too much money.i hope they win their case though

if i lived in a house that had mold and affecting my breathing and health…I WOULD MOVE. Racheal why didnt u leave like u husband did.?? a smart man.. if the mold is making u soooooo sick u should move. .

Mold…just the latest scam from what has sadly become a nation of whiners.

I just finished reading the best romance novel I’ve read in a LONG time. Secrets On Lake Drive was so awesome, I’m going to read it again! Look it up on Barnes and Noble online.

Mold can actually get into the blood stream and cause major problems…
People purchase homes and have too much trust in Inspectors who many times have their pockets padded by contractors….
I say, Go for It and Good Luck with your suit….it’s not all about the house….it’s about health.

The hazzards of buying a home and a sad fact of life.

RR is going to have to prove that these two companies were negligent. Frankly, I don’t see it. Home inspections are, by all accepted standards, visual inspections. If there was no mold apparent or if the previous homeowners had cleaned it up, the inspection copmany would not be to blame. I am not sure what the second company did, though it appears they were there to advise about renovations. Like the home inspection company, they would not have been involved in penetrating the walls, ceilings, or floorboards. It seems to me that the only course of action would be to do some research into the previous homeowners, to see if it could be proven that they knew of the mold. But even then, it would have to be established that they did nothing. If they were proactive in eliminating the mold, the sale would have been in good faith.

Of course all this assumes that it can be established that the mold was there when RR bought the home.

It seems like a terribly hard uphill fight for RR.

Could someone tell me how I can sue someone or some big corporation so I can get a check and live the hoopty life?

For those who are sensitive mold cam be deadly. Many people have severe allergies to mold.

To the arrogant idiot who commented about blue cheese– eating mold is totally different from INHALING it.

As for the $ amount of the suit– There are houses that have had to be torn down because of mold! OH, and BTW– the lawyer gets half the $.

I am NOT a Rachel Ray devote. That does not mean I would treat her as many of you have.

I do know buying a house near water is always a risk. The ocean or lake is beautiful to look at but can bring many unexpected issues. I prefer “high and dry.”

i have the same problem here in illinois . i have lived in a house for 8 years . found out 2 years later that black mold was growing behind the wall. told the landlord about the problem told me nothing to worry about . so what does he do??? painted right over the mold 2 weeks later it came back i told him about it he told me there was nothing to worry about mold it wont hurt you. then 1 year later i started having problem in my ab. lots of pain. hospital (osf) done alot of test on me the next 2 years guess what nothing is showing in my blood. so i went to call knox county helath dept. and they told me there is nothing they can do about it . next years i was inspectin my roof and fell threw it . it really is a nice house . couldnt tell the roof was rotten tell i fell threw. finally my landlord call his insurance company last year to tell them about it the cut him a check for 7200 to get the roof fixed took 15 months to get my roof fixed . i told my doctor i think all these proplems im having are due to mold . she said mold harming humans is a myth. other words she told me nothing to worry about . then i had been diagnosed with diverticulitous then it was a torn ab muscle then stomach ulsers. then ibs . then finally cronic pancreatitus . i think all this digagones are wrong i really thinks its mold . but illinois has no laws to enforce mold. all they give u is to call the local building inspector of the city and he’ll kick you out of the house . i really understand what shes going threw .i hope she reads this message if she wants to contact me go for it searay4377@yahoo.com i will be more then happy to talk to her about this issue i hope she take this issue to her show and soon . many lifes are being hurt and the goverment dont care .thanks for the story and racheal you have all my repect for what your doing good luck !

I hope they win. I move in an apartment and almost five years later a mouse ate through the wall and I saw black around the hole. I realized it was black mole and wonder why me and my kids had started getting sick. Now I live in a house and it is white and you can see the mold around the outside of the house. I know nothing will get done you need lots of money to get help! Good luck the her and husband.

Hey Rachel…..

just sprinkle some EVOO on the mold.

I feel bad for what i said about Rachel, sorry. I LUV YOU RACHEL. Can I borrow your husband cause i want to sue my landlord for 4 million dollars because i think the blacktop in my driveway is too hard.

Stay tuned for the next episode of” The Attack of the Black Mold”

seems like a flimsy way for them to get out of buying this house and have it be paid for by the contractors.I know she’s a strict business woman just like Martha Stewart so I find it hard to believe she didn’t know they were creating mold

As an owner of a mold restoration company, we see everyday how people’s lives are negatively affected by chronic long-term exposure to mold in their homes. If you live in a home that has ever had water damage, slow and undetected leaks, you are at risk for having mold presence. An inspection from a qualified mold inspection company (like ours) and a 3rd party industrial hygenist can definitely determine if mold is present and can work on a remediation plan to get rid of it. Only work with mold remediatiors who are IICRC industry certified. Contractors who do not have specialized training can actually make the problem worse. Be an informed citizen. Learn what to look for in your home!

Didn’t know mold was such a bother to chipmunks.

Vicky says
Check out Know the Cause.com It is all about mold, fungus, and diseases.
It is worth looking at Rachael. Also, Think Fungus First.com Both are very helpful with food allergies and other issues.
Love VV

Rachel Ray has that undefinable something that makes her so easy to hate.

This problem is not about liking or disliking Rachael and or John. It is about buying a home and becomming sick from it. I hvae read so many remarks here concerning what they deserve or don’t deserve using everything from Rachaels cooking skills to habits that she may or may not have as reasons. If you don’t like her, don’t watch her. If you do like her, that has nothing to do with thisproblem. John is an attorney and has probably researched this problem. I doubt that he would besueing if there was not a probability of fault in the company that did the inspection. Who are we to set injudgement of a subject we know so little about and themjudge on unrelated ideas. Come on folks and get a grip

What about all the lead based toys that are sold at Walmart? Walmart buys cheap China stuff from sweat houses that are toxic for our kids.The holidays are on the way,if you shop at Walmart watch what you buy.The government does not always tell the truth on what is safe and what is not.Lead paint is just as bad as mold in your kids mouth.

I hope she dies

They need to check if the previous owners had burst pipes
from freezing during the winter months then they need to
call there homeowners insurance company and have a restoration company like servpro come in and clean the place up and probably strip the place done to the bare walls
also check out the basement because this is where mold starts. I would drop the lawsuit and call there homeowners
insurance to clean place up they should also check if house
was flooded. Sometimes when it rains water can seep into
house flooding the house and basement and carpet pad is
wet leaving mold in it’s place. Maybe they should sell
there house move to Arizona she could do her show from
Arizona, she could move to Florida too do her show from
there too. A warmer climate can do her some good I hadbuts with croup it’s like asthma or bronchitus. Your
chest feel like it’s tied up it knots.

Mold is a common problem and the majority of people don’t realise they’re living with it. And trusting a local contractor who claims they can remove it is anothe issue. It’s not a problem to ignore. And be sure you’re contractor is thorough.

dollarsandsensecoupons.com

This lady has one of the best and most intering progams on tv in a long time , stay out of her personal life , watch her cook you might learn somthing,,,,,ps i for one love her voice,,,,,,,,,best of luck to RR,,,,

I seldom read these blogs and after spending a few minutes here I remember why…….

Hi All,

Yes, if there’s mold in her home it’s a shame; but is it really the tragedy and the injustice that the media is making it out to be?

She and her husband are suing inspectors for work that they did in 2007. According to many of the media reports, the mold was only just discovered inside wall cavities while doing renovations to prepare the home for sale. In other words, they’d lived there for three years without seeing any visible mold and are attributing her symptoms to mold only because mold has been found now.

A home inspection is strictly visual. Inspectors aren’t allowed to pull up carpeting or cut holes in walls – not even tiny holes – so there would have been no way that an inspector could have detected mold that’s inside of a wall cavity now let alone in 2007.

Here is a fact you might not know; there is mold everywhere. Mold is on every square inch of your keyboard, on your clothing, in your lungs, in your home, in your car, everywhere you go 24/7/365? Did you know that the mold that is ever present in the environment and that you breath 24/7/365 is exactly the same mold that the media is always characterizing as “toxic” mold when they write these sensational news stories? How is it that, if something is so “toxic” that we aren’t all sick all the time?

Aren’t homes in the Hamptons closed up for days at a time when their owners are working elsewhere? I grew up in New York state; I know how cold it gets in the winter and I know that most vacation and weekend homes there are closed up tighter than a drum during the winter unless there is housekeeping staff living there. If Ms. Ray and her husband spend a substantial amount of time in the city during the winter, because they don’t want to make that slick and dangerous commute in the snow to the Hamptons, and they don’t have live-in staff, wouldn’t it be logical that ambient humidity in her home could build up to much higher-than-normal levels?

There is a process known as vapor diffusion; wherein vapor-laden air moves from warmer to cooler and moister to drier. All homes experience vapor diffusion; some more than others. It’s simple building science and it occurs everywhere on the planet.

In New York in the winter the air outside is extremely dry and cold while interior air is very warm and moisture-laden. If Ms. Ray and her husband left their home closed up for days at a time, ambient moisture would build up in that home and then move via vapor diffusion outward through the building envelope to the outside. If there is too much humidity in the home – either because her whole house ventilation system has been turned off to conserve heat and lower heating costs when she isn’t there, or because she’s got it improperly adjusted – as it passes through the exterior envelope some of that moisture-laden air will condense and freeze on the inside of the exterior wall cavities. Guess what happens to that moisture over time? It fosters mold growth.

It’s been more than three years. Visible mold growth can form in as little as three days – this was mold in the exterior walls. Are inspectors expected to have x-ray vision? No. If the job were to find mold, it would be the easiest job in the world; all the inspector would have to do is swipe a fingertip over any surface and declare the home “infested.” That’s not the job. The job is to spot defective installation of flashing around windows and doors that will allow water in; to find leaks under fixtures and from plumbing; to find improperly configured/installed HVAC systems; to find leaky roofs, to find water infiltration into basements and crawlspaces, etc. In other words, to try and spot those things that could cause moisture in a home to be excessive AT THE TIME OF THE INSPECTION and to inform the client of those issues, explain why they are bad for the house and recommend a course of action to them. That’s where the job ends – it doesn’t include returning to the home every day for the next three years to ensure that Ms. Ray and her husband have been keeping the whole house ventilation system turned on and properly programmed and it doesn’t include cutting into walls looking for signs of previous water intrusion that might have been expertly concealed by any reasonably competent contractor hired to fix a previous issue and ensure no trace existed that any such issue had ever existed.

Someone talked about air sampling. What a joke. When there is mold spore in 100% of the air all the time, air sampling doesn’t give you any useful information. Air sampling ALWAYS results in a finding of “toxic” mold. A year ago, one of my students contacted me because her elderly mother was feeling ill and thought the cause was mold. I went out to look at the house. The mother explained to me that she’d had a washing machine hose burst; and, because of what she’d seen on a TV show, had been afraid of mold. She said that within a couple of days of the water being cleaned up in her basement she began feeling ill so she’d called a “Mold Inspector.” The inspector arrived, took air samples, left and then called her several days later to inform her that she had “toxic” levels of mold in her home. She didn’t know what to do. He had the solution. He recommended a local company. That company came and cleaned her house. The inspector came back and again reported “toxic” levels of mold in the house after taking an air sample. She got on the phone and after a long argument got the remediation company to come back and re-clean the house for a reduced fee. She brought the inspector back again and he took another air sample. This time, he declared the air of the house free of all mold (?). Weeks after she’d spent over $10,000 to get her home cleaned twice and had him in there to take air samples three times, she was still feeling ill. I asked her how long she’d lived in that home – 64 years. I asked if she’d ever had a washing machine hose burst before – she had. I asked if she’d ever been sick from mold in her life – she hadn’t. I then pointed out to her that she lives in an area where there is mold around her, on her and in her 24/7/365 and asked her why she thought she’d gotten sick after 80 plus years from mold after this one instance. She couldn’t think of anything except the TV show and the fact that before that she’d never thought about it. She keeps a nice clean house and in our temperate climate keeps her windows open a little bit most of the time. I told her to just keep doing what she’s been doing her entire life and stop worrying about the bogeyman. The next day the daughter called me and wanted to know what miraculous thing I had done to cure her mother. Apparently, for the first time in months her mother was feeling well and her symptoms had disappeared overnight.

The CDC, the EPA, the European health agency, and I believe the American Academy of Science (Or is it the American Science Academy) have extensively studied mold and haven’t been able to determine what constitutes a high threshold for exposure. They all agree that too much mold is probably not a good thing but they can’t prove that it has really any serious deleterious affects on otherwise healthy persons and they all agree that there is no proven causal link between mold and alleged mold illnesses in otherwise healthy individuals with normally functioning immune systems and no known allergies to mold.

How do you explain away the fact that here in the western corridor of Washington State where I live there is an extremely high spore count of all of the alleged “toxic” molds – much higher than in most other parts of the country, including New York State – yet the number of persons getting sick from mold exposure here is no more and no less than anywhere else?

Mold, the same varieties that the media and our mold testing friends characterize as “toxic” has been around since before man first walked on the planet; yet, we’ve somehow manage to populate the planet in spite of the mold. Pretty miraculous.

Here is a simple indisputable fact: there is no such thing as “toxic mold.” There are certain fungi that certain persons are allergic to. That makes those fungi toxic for those persons – not everyone.

Maybe Ms. Rae has an allergy to mold; or maybe it’s just an allergy to perfume or certain ingredients used in cooking. Painters have been known to develop allergies to paint, chefs have been known to develop allergies to certain foods, many people have been known to develop allergies to many substances in the environment that don’t effect others – that hardly constitutes a crime or negligence on the part of those persons that produce those substances. Does it?

What is sad is that both of these inspection companies might have gone, because of her celebrity status and the fact that her husband is a high-profile attorney, far beyond the accepted standards of practice, in order to do superior inspections for them. In the end, it might come out in court that there is no way to prove that the home wasn’t free of mold three years ago and that the inspectors, from all appearances, did better-than-normal inspections on her home and the inspectors will be exonerated.

Do you think that by then it will make any difference to those inspectors whose businesses and livelihoods have been trashed by the media? There is not a whole lot of profit in the home inspection business; most inspectors are barely scraping by in this economy and have long since exhausted most of what they’d been able to save in the good years just trying to keep their heads above water.

Ms. Ray has the resources to get her home properly abated and fixed easily. She won’t be out of a job and her family won’t be homeless by the time the lawsuit is over with. Let’s hope that the families of those inspectors whose reputations and business will have been ruined by this can say the same when this is all over.

Mike O’Handley
Editor – The Inspector’s Journal

Home inspectors are not mold inspectors, eventhough some try to be. Effective next year, mold assessors and mold remediators will need to be licensed in Florida and that leaves most home inspectors out.

elderly,children under 2 yrs; aids ,blood transfusions,cancer of the blood & recent dental ,create low ammune system & make any & all suseptible to mold exposure & jan/2010 under obama administration ‘cdc’colleges will have to teach students about mold, as well mayo clinic states 38 million people suffer from mold exposure-respertory ‘sp’ problems. wish i’d know this prior to my dental surgery for 2 yr’s doctor treated me for wrong things sinus infections w/enemy antibiotics that lower immune system-horror show for mold exposure people. but it appears to be taboo even allegist don’t tell you about the effects of organs that mold does., catch 22. just do research prior to talking stupid.

before you a buy a house make sure that the house had no defect its not easy to raise this amount she must be considerate