MILWAUKEE, Wis. — A Wisconsin woman is seeking a refund from a mold remediation company after she says they failed to properly clean her flood-damaged basement and then stopped responding to her calls.
Carol is one of the thousands of people across the state impacted by the historic August floods. She hired a local company to remediate her basement, but after several rounds of work and testing, mold was still there.
Now she has to hire a second company to get the job done, and said the first company, which did a shoddy job, is ignoring her.
She emailed TMJ4's Investigative Reporter Jenna Rae for help.
"I was out of town, and I saw on the news that there was a flood here," Carol said. "We called a friend and asked them to go in the basement and check to see if we had water, and the next day I got a call that said 'yes, you had water.'"
Carol had a few inches of water in her basement and came home to damaged artwork, materials, tables, stereos, and more. She knew remediation was necessary.
"Because it was a disaster basically, you know, it was hard to find somebody. And to find somebody who you thought was qualified to do this," Carol explained.
Carol's first call was to licensed home inspector and mold specialist Michael Schwitzer.
"Went over there, saw the mess, did the testing, and got the results. Came back and she did have mold in the house," Schwitzer, owner of 1st Choice Inspection, said.
Schwitzer has been doing mold testing for more than 20 years. He works with Sporecyte Lab in Utah.
"I did both surface testing and air testing," Schwitzer said.
Along with the results of his testing, Schwitzer sent Carol his recommended remediation protocol and three companies to hire for the job.
Carol went with a company she found that's accredited with the Better Business Bureau: DJK Environmental. It's a locally owned company out of Milwaukee.
"They were a little cheaper than other places," Carol said. "They could come, and they let me read their contract, and I was online and read about them, and they, I guess, convinced me they could do an adequate job."
Carol signed a contract with DJK and paid more than $3,300 for remediation.
Two days later, Schwitzer came back to test for mold again.
"They didn't do a good job. You could see there were areas that didn't even look like they were touched," Schwitzer said. "So I re-tested, tested in the same areas that I tested previously, and ran the test again."
Those results still showed high levels of mold.
"They came back on the 11th to redo the job," Carol said.
Carol says DJK then came back a third time for remediation, which prompted Schwitzer to test for mold again.
"I made calls to that company to discuss my results so that they could come in and do the areas that I kept testing. They didn't return my call, two calls actually," Schwitzer said. "Tested, failed, tested, failed, and at that point, Carol was upset, which, rightfully so."
"It's frustrating. I've given up on that. How long can I keep trying?" Carol said. "I tried to call them, I tried to make contact, and I wasn't getting any kind of response, so I decided to reach out to you."
In the meantime, Carol hired and paid Dave Michalski, owner of Restoration1, to do the job she originally hired and paid DJK.
"We were looking for any snowflake pattern, they call it, so although you can't see mold, you can see the evidence of it, and we did see some of that," Michalski said. "Regardless of how many times somebody went and cleaned it, we have to go through and do the job again."
Carol now has a clean and mold-free basement, but is out nearly $8,000 since she had to pay twice for the job to get done.
Multiple attempts were made to contact DJK Environmental by calling them, emailing them, and even showing up to their office.
Within minutes of showing up, someone responded to an email saying management was out of the state and could not get back to me before my deadline.
TMJ4 News even emailed DJK again and called its owners after our deadline. No one has returned our phone calls, and we have not heard from management via email.
At this point, Carol said she's just hoping for a refund.
"It's like I'm paying for something twice and again, had they responded, maybe, but they just wrote me off and said, you know, I don't know what they said, because I never heard from them again," she explained.
If there's something you want Jenna Rae to investigate, email her at jenna.rae@tmj4.com.
This story was reported on-air by Jenna Rae and has been converted to this platform with the assistance of AI. Our editorial team verifies all reporting on all platforms for fairness and accuracy.
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