Sam Russek
Jaider Vara had tried his best to keep his wife and 5-year-old daughter away from the black mold that bloomed on the walls of their apartment in the Villas Del Paseo apartment complex in West Houston. Since a burst pipe flooded their one bedroom after Winter Storm Uri, he’d ripped out the carpet and disinfected the area covered in spores, but there was only so much he could do without tearing down the walls and fixing the leak himself. Then, nearly a month after the mid-February storm, his apartment flooded again after plumbers contracted by the complex botched a repair on the other side of the wall.
