Harbour residents believe mold led to illness

Some Orange Coast College student residents at The Harbour began to notice what they believed to be mold in their bathrooms and on air conditioning vents in their apartments this fall, and a few fell seriously ill. 

For Jubilee, a freshman criminal justice major, her fall semester was an ordeal that included urgent care visits, hiring a lawyer and passing out in the school bathroom multiple times due to illness. She asked that Coast Report only use her first name because she fears legal retaliation from The Harbour. 

“The first week that I lived at The Harbour, I pulled an all-nighter one night,” Jubilee said. “I was just in my room doing homework and I felt my throat getting really sick. I didn’t know [what was] going on. And then the next day, my left side of my neck was super inflamed and my left lymph node was puffing up really big.”

Jubilee said that over the course of a week, her inflamed lymph node grew and became more painful. 

“I couldn’t go to school because I was unable to eat,” she said. “I couldn’t drink anything. It would hurt so bad. I was just in my room crying. So I went to the school, the nurse at OCC, and they were like, ‘you need to go to the hospital right now.’”

At the urgent care, she was told that she had a peritonsillar abscess from a deep infection of the neck and head, and if she had waited a few days longer, it could have burst, flooding her lungs with fluid, which could have resulted in her death. 

Published on December 19, 2022 by Coast Report.