THE NUTSHELL
Our house has toxic vapors that are making us sick, necessitating an urgent move. On top of that, our landlord (who is also our neighbor and a church) is evicting us to ‘do something to the house’ and wants us out by February 15, 2024. This is a crisis for three disabled adults and one disabled child, who want and need to move out of a house that is further disabling them. We need more time than one month. What's more is that we have been devastated financially by this situation and are on SNAP and TANF benefits, plus Medicaid. Clearly, we are not financially positioned to move in one month's time. The church has offered zero support of any kind to assist us in making this transition this soon.
Thank you for taking the time to read our story.
Over the course of the five years that we've lived in our current rental house, our family has been exposed to and been made very sick by toxic gasses that we believe are emanating from a faulty, unlicensed septic tank on our neighbor's (who are also our landlord’s) property, moving through their damp soil and vaporizing into our house through the floorboards. This gas transfer process is called Vapor Intrusion (link). We didn’t know this was actually the case until a year ago after testing showed us where the vapors are coming from. A good part of that time was spent at home following doctor’s advice to avoid Covid, for which a few of us are very high risk. Little did we know our safe haven was making us sick.
Illustration of Vapor Intrusion. Source: EPA
As a result, all members of our household have been seriously ill and unable to work or attend school. We have been debilitated by chronic daily pain, migraines, skin conditions, passing out, exacerbations of existing medication conditions, and more. The daily chronic health issues have clouded our brains and clogged our finances sufficiently enough that the thought of moving has seemed insurmountable.
Our property management company was happy to provide us with relocation services, per law and their own moral compass. However, once it became clear to them that the chemicals were coming from next door causing the illness, their management of the property was suddenly terminated by the church. This trapped us in place. Moreover, our landlords/the church have been totally uncooperative and have denied any and all responsibility for the gasses that have been making us sick, and are now evicting us, with a move-out date of February 15, 2024.
We are currently embroiled in a legal battle with them over damages that we have incurred because of their negligence. We have been counting on using proceeds from a lawsuit against them to move, but the proceedings are dragging on interminably (as legal matters tend to do), and we simply can't wait any longer to get out of this house.
To add insult to injury, the church is trying to evict us, a move that we see as blatantly retaliatory. We do have a potential option for extending that a bit, but there's no guarantee that they will work. So as of this writing, we are trying to raise money so that we can secure a new rental house to move into no later than Feb 15, 2024.
FUNDRAISING TO GET OUT
So, we are in a bind, and this is where we need help from you, dear Reader. We need to move because the air in our house has been making us sick. Only after we move can I try to return to work. We are currently in a dangerous and impossible situation. If you are interested in learning more about how we came to these conclusions above, please read on to get a better sense of our story. Also, here is a link to our legal complaint against Evergreen Presbyterian Church for those interested. For a lengthy preview, it is also embedded below this text.
We are seeking support for $3000 x 3 (1st, 2nd, deposit) and $1,200 for moving expenses = $10,200.
IT ALL STARTED WITH A SEWAGE LEAK
In 2022, we had a massive sewage leak in our crawlspace that took several months to remediate due to incompetency and poor communication on the part of the contractors hired by our property management company. During this period of time, we were regularly smelling strong odors of raw sewage inside our home, and we became concerned about what potential toxins, if any, we were being exposed to as a result. Could this be part of what was making us sick?
A section of sewer pipe we saved as a souvenir. Galvanized steel corrodes from the inside out. That's a penny in the center of it. Image Source: Kelly Schneyer
Our first step was to purchase and place several AirThings Wave Mini devices around the house. They are small ‘puck-like’ items which detect the presence of T(total)VOCs in the air. Being an inexpensive device, the pucks are only able to detect whether or not there are VOCs present at all - it can't identify exactly what the VOCs are. So, when our AirThings 'pucks' confirmed that yes, there were, in fact, abnormally high levels of VOCs in the air of our house, the next step was to hire an Industrial Hygienist to do air quality testing to find out what these compounds actually were. This was not an inexpensive test to have done, but we needed to know what we were being exposed to.
AirThings Wave Mini placed on a table top. Image Source: AirThings
The Industrial Hygienist's report gave us a long list of chemicals that were detected, such as Acetone, Toluene & Benzene, amongst several others. These are all highly toxic chemicals that have no business being in the air of a residence in ANY amount. Upon further investigation we also learned that these and other chemicals found are all byproducts of methamphetamine production. While this would be an eyebrow-raising discovery under any circumstances, it was particularly alarming in this situation.
2-hour canister to test for 60 VOCs in the air. Image Source: Kelly Schneyer
When we first moved into the house, and learned that the church next door were actually our landlords (this wasn't immediately obvious because we paid our rent to a property management company that was hired by the church), we decided to take a look at their website to see what they were all about. It was there that we discovered that the church next door had been built in 1999, “on the site of a former meth lab”. While this struck us as an incredibly bizarre piece of information to find on a church's website, we didn't think too much of it at the time - surely they had gone through the proper remediation processes to ensure that any toxic chemicals left in the ground as a result of meth being produced on the premises had been properly dealt with…
Original web page crawled by Archive.org. Original source: Evergreen Presbyterian Church. Updated source.
However, upon learning that the VOCs in our house's air were byproducts of meth waste, our brains immediately flashed back to that bizarre piece of info we learned a few years prior. Could the VOCs that were detected in the air in our house be coming from contaminated ground next door?
There was only one way to find out - soil gas testing. This test (which cost over $2000, and, along with the air quality testing, we paid for out-of-pocket from our dwindling savings) would take samples of the soil 5-feet beneath our house, and 5-feet beneath the property line, then analyze them to determine if there were any gases or VOCs present.
These tests confirmed our suspicions. Not only were the same VOCs that were present in our house's air also present in the soil below the house, the concentration of them was stronger at the property line, strongly indicating that the source of the problem was next door (East Property Line and in bold), on the church's property. The constituents in red on the report (refer to infographic) showed in our air quality testing AND soil gas testing.
List of chemicals found in the soil. The ones in red were also found in the air of our house at the time of testing. Data Source: Xavier Environmental Final Testing Report
The icing on the cake was when the plumbing inspector for the City of Beaverton came by on our request, pushed aside some grass with his toe to reveal a cap sticking out of the ground, and said “yep, there's the inspection port, right there”.
Visual confirmation, by Beaverton's Plumbing Inspector, of the unpermitted septic tank's inspection port found on Evergreen Presbyterian Church's playground. Image source: Kelly Schneyer
We knew that the remedy was to encapsulate the crawlspace, a process normally used to prevent radon from entering homes. which we thought would be possible in ours. Also, we wanted to be 100% certain that this issue was in the soil and not just something in our house off-gassing – which had already been ruled out by the industrial hygienist. But this is a serious accusation, so…
Fast forward to November 2022, when the report was finalized, we handed said report to our property manager. They started working on remediation solutions and also offered to pay for us to move out given the unsafe conditions of the house. We politely declined this offer for two reasons. First, other things being equal, we liked the house and didn't want to move. Second, at that point in time, we believed that the issue could be mitigated, and that our landlords would work with us in good faith to remedy the problem.
Left screenshot: "demolished a dilapidated house used as a meth lab and began to..." Right screenshot has scrubbed text ... a dilapidated house and began to ..." Image sources: Archive.org
Only they didn't. Actually, they scrubbed the 'meth lab' text from their web site (see above) and have completely ignored the fact that we've been sickened by their house. Which is what brings us where we are today.
