Eric Parsons / Star staff Crews are rebuilding showers inside and resealing the outside of a tower at St. John's hospital.

Hallways carry the faint odor of a swimming pool. Lights in the operating room corroded, and so did equipment used to sterilize surgical tools.

But some six weeks after Ventura County's busiest hospital was closed for 10 days, tented and fumigated with chlorine dioxide gas, the results of spore strip tests prove the mold is dead, said officials of St. John's Regional Medical Center in Oxnard.

"Gone," said T. Michael Murray, the hospital's president.

Sabre Technical Services, the New York firm linked to presidential candidate Rudy Giuliani, was paid a reported $24 million to fumigate the huge 265-bed hospital using a gas never before employed in California to fight mold. It was a process marked by last-minute state approvals, debates over the need for the work and a countywide effort to minimize the effect of Southern California's first temporary hospital closure since the Northridge earthquake in 1994.

"The concern was, would other hospitals be able to handle a big surge in patients?" said Barry Fisher, administrator of the county's emergency medical services. "Things went wonderfully. I couldn't be more pleased with how the hospitals in the county reacted and staffed up and did what they had to do to take care of patients."

Sabre's parent company, BioONE, is co-owned by Giuliani. To test the work of the chlorine dioxide, Sabre employees placed spore strips in 860 locations throughout the hospital. Each strip contained 1 million spores of a bacteria called bacillus atrophaeus that scientists said is far more resistant to chlorine dioxide than mold spores are.

I feel good' about process

Murray said the test results show the bacterial spores were killed. Other indicators show the chlorine dioxide gas penetrated to the source of the mold at the needed concentration levels.

That means the mold entombed in the hospital's walls was killed, Murray said.

"I feel very good about the process and feel very good that it's over," he said.

Skeptics continue to question the fumigation process, claiming the work was driven by the ongoing snarl of litigation over who was to blame for the mold, and that it wasn't needed because the Stachybotrys fungus doesn't represent a real health threat.

Others argue any mold that was trapped in the hospital will come back, because the leaks that caused the problems in the first place haven't been completely repaired.

"If you have showers that are going to leak, you're going to have mold," said Gary Proffett, medical director of the SeaView Independent Physician Association in Oxnard. "The mold is going to reoccur. I don't care what they say."

Murray said the mold won't come back because the fumigation eradicated any trace.

"There's nothing in the wall to grow," he said.

60 beds out of commission

Workers on scaffolding covered by huge plastic sheets continue to apply a waterproof coating to four stories of the hospital's exterior. They're sealing windows and replacing showers. The work could continue through May.

About 60 beds are out of commission. Admissions have been growing since Aug. 24, when the hospital reopened with seven patients. There now are about 180 patients.

Assessments of the rust damage, blamed on the chlorine dioxide gas, vary. Murray said some of the older X-ray equipment is functional but needs replacing, and there's been damage to hinges, some medical instruments like the sterilizing device, and some surgical lights, which have been replaced.

Hospital officials are also replacing the dark blue carpet that turned several shades lighter during the fumigation and are talking about how to replace historical photos that were damaged.

Murray said the costs of repairs and replacements is miniscule compared with savings realized by fumigating the hospital instead of fighting the mold in a piecemeal approach that would have taken several years.

Proffett said he has been told the fumigation affected other equipment, too, including scopes used to examine eyes and ears, and a treadmill. He worries the rust could have caused undetected internal damage to major medical equipment or wiring in walls.

"I think there's long-term effects that no one has even thought about," he said.

Murray said the hospital's CAT scan and catheterization labs are functioning fine. He said there's no indication of any major problems.

In the respiratory department, where union steward Charlie Goodwin works, things are going smoothly, with rust damage limited to staplers, hole punches and a scale.

"Basically, we're back to business as normal," Goodwin said.