GARY-Kenneth Morton has been on the losing side of a yearlong battle against mold.

His Morningside Avenue home, near Broadway and 45th Avenue, was one of many homes in the region hit by flood waters last September. Enough water seeped into his basement to cover his foot, he said.

It was more than enough. Mold has grown over his basement walls ever since, and Morton said he has been at a loss as how to deal with it.

“It did more damage than a fire,” Morton said.

Help has finally come, though, in the form of the Lakeshore Area Regional Recovery of Indiana, a not-for-profit group set up to help home owners deal with flood damage. LARRI sent a group of local high school seniors to three area homes Saturday, including Morton’s to tear out the water-damaged floor and wall coverings.

The 30 students were attending the Catholic Youth Xperience conference in Valparaiso, which has seniors do a service project each year. The students at Morton’s house spent the day using shovels to scrape up tile from the floor and pull plaster off the walls. They wore face masks to protect themselves from the mold.

Lauren Williams, a senior at Highland High School, helped carry out scraps of tile to a dumpster outside. Williams said the conference has been one of her favorite weekends of the year since she started going four years ago and the service project was a new experience.

“It’s something I don’t get to do,” she said, adding that she wouldn’t know how to find homeowners in need of help.

The help has been a blessing for Morton, he said.

He’s tried wiping the walls down with a mix of soap and bleach to kill the mold and used fans and open windows to dry out the area. None of it worked, though, and the black mold remained. Morton, who used to be a building inspector in Chicago, said he had never seen anything as bad and had no idea what to do to get rid of it. Other than staying out of the basement as much as possible, Morton stood at a standstill.

His wife finally found out about LAARI’s program through her work and called to see if LARRI could assist them.

“It means a difference between day and night,” he said of the help.

It’s help that not everyone who needs it knows about, though, Donna George, communications coordinator for LARRI said. The group had originally gotten a list of about 1,100 people but wants to reach out to the other 16,000 people who registered the Federal Emergency Management Agency last year after the floods. George said that despite press coverage, it seems people still aren’t aware of the services LARRI offers.

“It seems to be a challenge,” she said.