Southeast McLennan County · Population about 1,000

Mold Remediation in Riesel, Texas

Riesel is a small town southeast of Waco on Highway 6, a farming community that appeared with the railroads and has stayed small. It has one distinction most Texas towns of a thousand people don't: the USDA Agricultural Research Service established its Grassland Soil and Water Research Laboratory watershed facility near Riesel specifically because of its central location in the Blackland Prairie, and the site has been collecting rainfall and runoff data there for the better part of a century.

Living on the reference soil

That's a useful thing to know as a homeowner here, because it means the ground under Riesel is the ground researchers picked as representative of the whole region. Houston Black clay, very high clay content, very slow permeability, and pronounced shrink-swell behavior through the seasons.

The practical translation is simple. Rain doesn't soak in quickly — it runs off or sits. Ground that sits wet stays wet a long time. And through a Central Texas summer, that same soil pulls back hard from foundations, opening cracks and then swelling shut again when the fall rains come.

For houses, that means foundation movement is normal here, not exceptional, and the plumbing running through and under slabs takes the strain. For pier and beam homes it means uneven pier settlement over the decades. Both produce the same eventual result: water somewhere it shouldn't be.

Small-town housing stock

Riesel's homes skew old. Pre-war construction is common, and pier and beam foundations with vented crawl spaces are the norm on those houses. Those crawl spaces sit directly on the clay, almost never have a vapor barrier, and are vented on the assumption that outdoor air will dry them — an assumption that fails badly in a humid Central Texas spring, when the vents deliver moisture onto cool floor joists instead.

Original plumbing is the other age issue. Cast-iron drain lines crack at the hubs as the ground moves. Galvanized supply lines fail at threaded joints. Neither failure is dramatic and both put water under or inside the structure for a long time before anyone notices.

Farm buildings

Most properties out here have barns, equipment sheds and grain or feed storage. Metal buildings without vapor control condense on the underside of the roof on clear cool nights and drip on whatever is below. Buildings with dirt floors stay damp permanently. Anything porous stored in them — hay, feed, furniture, boxes — is a mold risk regardless of the house.

Free referral

Tell us what you're dealing with and whether it's the house or an outbuilding. We'll hand it to a mold contractor working the southeast side of the county. Free, and no obligation to hire anyone.

We take referrals across 76682 and the surrounding Mart, Hallsburg and Downsville areas.