Hi, everybody. Chuck here with my select pick of the week, How crime scene Cleanup Works from September seven, two thousand ten. There's an oldie body goody and part of our probably not ever going to be finished sweet on crime and punishment, And this one was pretty good crime scene clean up. You never think about that. What happens, who goes in there, how's it done? What are the rules around crime scene clean up? And we detail all of that good stuff in this week's Selects episode. Welcome to Stuff you Should Know from house Stuff Works dot com. Hey, and welcome to the podcast. I'm Josh Clark. There's Charles W. Chuck Bryant, and h that makes the stuff you should know. Freshly shaven, m hm, I got rid of the beard. Yeah, I cleaned up this crime scene of the face. Your hair sticking on a really weird way? Is it out from my hat? Thank you? That's even crazier. Please don't like lick your thumb and come over like mommys the I should say for those of you who might be experiencing some sort of alarm or teror right now. Chuck kept the goatee. He just shaved the beard. Part of the parts that made it a beard. I guess the burnside mutton chops yea, and the neck fuzz Yeah, looking good, Thank you, Chuck. Have you ever seen a movie called Curdled No, it's a little sleeper produced by one Quentin Tarantino. It's about this very quiet, kind of demure woman who um gets a job as a crime scene clean up person. It's the girl from Pulp Fiction, the cab driver, right. I believe she. I believe she was the taxi driver who drove Bruce Willis around after the boxing match from Pulp Fiction. Really of that movie, I haven't seen it, but I think that's her. It's worth seeing, is it. But now that i've I've read this crime scene cleanup article on our fair site how stuff works dot com. Um, I realized just how far off the mark some of the details were on that was it pretty far? Yeah? A little bit. Have you seen Sunshine Cleaning? No, But from the previous that one looks pretty far off the mark to like, I remember seeing them carrying out like a mattress and just like you know, um, Mrs Brady spring cleaning type outfits. Yeah, you remember that she had like the little de rag and she had like the little clam diggers rolled up and like some converse on just like cute as a button. That was one of the jokes of the scenes. Actually, they were carrying out this Amy Adams and the other girl carrying out this nasty like bloody mattress and one of them dropped her end and the other one fell on the bloody stain and it was just like and it mate. It's really good movie though, actually was it? Yeah? It was great? Is it by the people who made um a little Miss Sunshine? Or am I just confusing that because sunt the name. It's a little indie though Alan Arkin was in it, so maybe so I wonder it's good? All right, Well, um, both of these movies are utter frauds when it comes to the details, right chuck uh yeah for the most part. Okay, let's talk about crime scene clean up, the real stuff, because there's nothing cute or about it. It's actually horrific work and it takes a very specific kind of person and the those people last in average of about eight months before they get burned out in this business, right yeah, all right, So it's actually called it's it's part of the cleaning industry and the it's a niche part of the cleaning industry, not very heavily marketed in traditional channels. Exactly, it's not how it works. Um. But it's called CTSD con Crime and Trauma Scene decontamination, right, and Um, basically what it is is it is a cleaning service on steroids. There's no Mrs Brady outfits. You're wearing full bio hazard has matt suits, no French Maids going on here, nothing like that, because you're dealing with some really dangerous stuff. You're dealing with um blow which often feature appropriately enough blood borne pathogens. Um, you're cleaning up meth labs. Yeah, that's a big one. Um, And a lot of times you're you're um And we should probably warn people this. This is gonna get a little graphic here. Sure, you can't do what I'm scene without being a little graphic, right, But I mean you're cleaning up like there may not be a body there anymore, but you're picking up pieces of bone that the the crime scene investigators missed. Um, you're scraping brain off of walls. It's not normal work, right, Yeah, I mean I think that's where the decontamination part of the CTS deacon comes in. It's not just cleaning, You're you're actually your goal is to return the spot to its original condition. So like you don't it made a point in this article, like you don't just clean the carpet because if the carpet has a two inch blood stain on the carpet, there's probably a two foot blood stain under the carpet on the floorboard. Right, Yeah, So cleaning the carpet doesn't work. You've gotta cut the carpet out, maybe cut the base base boards out, right, So it is decontaminations. Um who wrote this, Julia Layton, She's she's got the goods. She definitely has the goods, but the way she put it has to be actually clean, not just apparently clean, right yeah, which I do apparently cleaning in my house. But I mean we're not cutting up carpet and replacing floorboards or anything. Um So it takes a very certain type of person um because of the gore that you're going to have to deal with in a large number of your cases. Um So, a lot of the people in UM the ct S DACON industry or former or maybe even current e m t S emergency room nurses people who are already trained to deal with this kind of thing. Yeah, that that one articles And you know, I think that that company said they hire a lot of former firemen and I would think probably military people, people that have dealt with high stress and dead bodies. Yeah, basically, but it's not just that. I mean you have to um also is a crime scene clean up person. You have to have a sympathetic nature, is one of the points in this article. Right, sympathetic but not empathetic, right, because there's a lot of times when all the the the ambulance is gone, the cops are gone, but the family is still there and they may be sitting there sobbing while they're watching you clean the house. Um, and you you have to be able to, yeah, sympathize with them without getting caught up in and what they're experiencing. Right then you have to be able to remain detached, but you have to be um uh, you have to be understanding to what they're going through to Yeah. The one guy in that article that they interviewed said that he's cried along with families and stuff like that. And um, I think they also said that some companies offer grief counselors along with their service. Yeah, the upon request apparently, if you want a grief counselor usually that can be factored into the price or else the company will will give it to you for free. Yeah. In Sunshine Cleaning, there was never anyone at the scene, but um, it was realistic in some ways because one of the subplots involved UM. One of the girls found a wallet and an identification from the deceased and ended up looking up her daughter and befriending her daughter, but not telling the daughter that she had cleaned up her mother's suicide or homicide scene. So they kind of dealt with that, you know, delicately. That's great. Yeah, that's probably the one thing you should deal with delicately, right, Um, because some of the stuff that you're cleaning up is pretty rough stuff. So let's talk about the three main scenes that you're going to encounter as a UM clean up technician, Josh. Number one, you've got violent death, which is homicide, suicide or bad luck accident type of thing. You've got a decomposition, decomposing body happening, and meth labs is a lot of their business comes from meth labs that have exploded because meth labs are known for exploding. I don't even know that they necessarily have to have exploded. I think just the fact that there was a meth lab there, that's true. It means that you have to decontaminate the scene. Absolutely. Apparently meth labs um are so toxic that they're um capable of making people who live in a former meth lab sick, like a decade on um. Some of the toxins that you're running into our things like acetone, methanol, benzene, iodine, hydrochloric acid. This is like the ingredients of myth. Right, this is what people are snoring. Kids. Unless you want to turn into a disgusting, haggard wreck mess of a human, stay away from meth. Meth equals death. Just look at those pictures. You've seen those pictures on the internet that showed the before and after. Yeah, oh god, that that should be like on billboards in Oklahoma. We should talk a podcast on meth sometime. We have a good article. It's like Tom she wrote it. Yeah, we absolutely should. Um. So. One of the one of the reasons why meth labs are so dangerous is because you are going to absorb the stuff through your skin. It leaves a toxic breads to do, not just on walls, but on the air as well. So another um I guess prior job experience that is good to bring to the table if you're a crime scene clean up person is construction background or at the very least demolition, because a lot of cases, like with UM meth labs, like if it was a house or an apartment or something, you have to knock everything out. Anything that UM can't be put in some sort of decontaminating chemical. UM has to be taken out, thrown away. That includes drywall, floorboards, carpet, all this stuff until it's just down to the bones of the building. Yeah, or they will tear it down or more likely, uh, haul the trailer away. Well, let's talk about this. We said that you're not wearing UM just normal everyday spring cleaning clothes. You're wearing like full on biohezard suit. Right. What are some of the other um I guess tools of the trade, Chuckers, Well, there's there's a laundry list. Josh. You you definitely want your protective gear. UM. You have to have biowaste containers like big fifty five gallon drums to hold this stuff. You can't just throw it in a bag into the back of your van. There's regulations you gotta follow. Um, you're gonna have your regular cleaning supplies that you would need to clean up any kind of mess, you know, mops and disinfectants and that kind of thing. You've got your more hardcore supplies like industrial strength, like hospital strength, the disinfectants which only allow the merca bug to survive. Really now there's like hospital acquired mercer infections. I don't know anything about that. Yeah, or they like get used to the industrial cleaners and they're like these super bugs are like bring it. When you spray it on them, it's bad news. That's some ticks. You can have an ozone machine which removes odors. You can have a fogger which they will use to shoot um stuff into like air ducts to get rid of odors. Right, Well, it'll um. It takes a chemical and kind of gets it around corners and stuff. You get everywhere with it. When you have when you run it through a fogger, apparently you've got some enzyme solvents you want to kill bacteria, and it can also liquefied dried blood, which can be pretty nasty to get out once it's coagulated and dried, right, which is why you want shovels. Apparently chuck after what three hours two hours coagulates into kind of a jelly like goo that you can shovel into bags. So gross but very very thick bags biohazard bags. They also include in this article putty knives to scrape brain matter from the wall, because apparently brain when it dries becomes like cement, and we'll stick to something like cement, which is really gross and sad. You can also use um a steam basically a steamer to steam it back into gooiness. Yeah. And then my favorite thing, which is be the first thing in my van, would be the no touch cleaning system. And these are like big long scrubbing brushes, uh, heavy duty sprayers, things like that, like pressure washers and no touch cleaning system seems like the smartest cleaning system, yes it is. Yeah. Then, like you said, you want some carponry tools, probably ladders, stuff like that, and then a camera because you need to take before and after pictures for insurance, and you wouldn't think about that, right, And actually Apparently most insurance covers this, right, Yeah, insurance covers it a lot of times. Or if it's a homicide, I think it's paid for by the state, by the federal government really Crime Victory Victim Reparations Agency. Okay, and I know the state agencies that do that too, So well, we're getting aheir of ourselves. I don't mean to jump the gun, but let's talk more about some of the scenes. Specifically, we talked about meth labs, Chuck, one of the other big ones that you'll be called out to. That makes quite a message when a decomposing body is found, right, absolutely, he had to call him de comps in the in the trade. Uh, that's not gonna be like usually, it's not gonna be some big nasty um blood sprays and like brains and things. It's not gonna be all over the place, but it can be pretty nasty because a decomposing body, Josh, is really gross. Your body swells up, um insects move into your body and take up residence. Your organs are going to digest themselves, and your skin liquefies. Yeah, remember we talked about um rigor mortis or no, I think it was On the Body Farms episode, we talked a lot about how decomposition works. So if you want to know more about d COMP go listen to our Body Farms, Um eppie right, Yeah, And of course there's the smell. You can't talk about decomposition without the smell. No, And as Julia Layton puts it, it would bring an average person to his knees. Yeah, that's bad. Yes, apparently it's ammonia. It's an ammonia based smell created by d COMP like the litter box. Yeah, you ever cleaned out of litter box? Sure, I have toxic plasmos is all over the place, that's right. Um. The other thing too with a d COMP is and this you know, you don't think about these things when you hear about it on the news. But someone actually has to go behind after the body has been removed. There's probably liquefied parts of the body there, and there's also maggots that have already feasted and have the blood inside of them, and you gotta get it. You gotta get rid of them too, because they're carrying you know, disease maybe right, And so you have to basically scour the place looking for maggots, collect the maggots, and then you dispose of them through burning. Right, tastes like burning. That's dcompey, that's D. Now let's get down to the one that everybody's fascinated with that all the movies are about. And those are murder scenes, suicide scenes, accidental shootings, basically where somebody was shot it's specifically in the head, I guess is the worst. I mean, you've seen Full Metal Jacket, right, remember pile. Yeah, someone had to clean that up. Somebody did. Yeah, I'll bet it was a joker. Well, somebody in the art department for the movie. But uh, yeah, a violent death is not good because there's gonna be lots of blood. Especially suicides they say are probably the worst for the blood. Yeah, which is why I guess. I can't see shooting yourself in the head at home. That's just so so much of a problem. It's just a huge problem. At least go to a hotel or a motel. And that Hunter Thompson did, he shot himself in his basement while he's on the phone with his wife. But I mean, I think it's fine for him that he was on the phone with her because apparently he'd let her know that this was happening. This wasn't like she had no idea that something like this was going to happen, but at home. He did it at home, which I can understand wanting to be at home. But yeah, I guess shooting yourself in the head if you're going to why, I don't see why you would do it at home. Yeah, I agree. Uh, And like we said earlier, it has to be really really clean. So any bodily fluid is a potential pathogen. And not only that, but after you leave, if you don't get it all up, it can lead to mold and bacteria and cause people to get sick like months afterward. Yeah. Yeah, yeah, you have to, like you said, restore this place to the state it was in before the trigger was pulled, right, Yeah, And it can take up to, I mean a few hours to up to like forty eight hours to do this. Yeah. And apparently a good crime scene clean up company is gonna charge you about six hundred bucks an hour. Yeah, it ain't cheap um for one room with lots of blood for a homicide or suicide, it's gonna cost you between three and sixth grand I guess right. Yeah. One of the reasons why it's so expensive is because these people don't just take the stuff home and throw it in their trash out front. Right. There are really specific permits and rules that govern disposal of this which, by the way, we should say the actual industry itself is not regulated. Yeah, it's not nationally regulated. No, but they generally follow Ocean's bloodborne pathogen standards, which requires training and certification itself. Um. But to be a crime scene cleanup technician that you don't there's no national certification or even state or local certification. It's just company training. Yeah yeah, right, and but I'm you know, we'll talk about the training in a minute. But they obviously want to do a good job because the last thing you want is I mean, the turnover is already high enough, you know. Um. But like we said, there is plenty of permits and um standards and procedures to follow in disposing of this waste. Right. Yeah, you can't just like you said, you can't throw in the dumpster like they do in Sunshine cleaning. You have to incenterate it. And there are medical waste incinerator companies and uh, the one thing I thought they charged by the pound, which I thought was kind of gross. But how else are you going to do it? Because it's a pound of nastiness. Yeah, And the other thing I thought was kind of gross was they a lot of them have minimum charges. So if you don't have the minimum you have to keep this uh bio human bio waste in your van, well, not in your van, but if it's hot and in like a refrigerated space until you have collect enough of it to go to the incinerator. You know, I'll bet it's funny. I'll bet the same um, the same companies that that operate medical waste incinerators also just so happen to have some cold storage units that you can put your waist in until you have enough to burn. To be smart, but I'll bet it's I'll bet if you're in the industry for a while, you're friends with some guy who operates it, and you kick them like fifty bucks to throw your stuff in with somebody else's or whatever. But you better be incinerating it following proper procedure else you're a horrible jerk, right, Yes, And it's not just the goal where that has to be disposed of. Um, If you have just deconstructed a house that was a meth lab. You've got to do something with this waste again. Can't just take it to the dumpster you came and take it to a normal dump. You have to take it to special dumps that are um out of public reach, right right right? Um, and just transporting it you have to have a special permit for that, right, you have to have a has Met permit. Yeah, my friend, uh, my friend Timmy has he works in has Matt Disposal And now yeah you met Timmy. Now he does a lot of um like trained derailments and stuff like that. But he used to live in Oklahoma, and in Oklahoma nothing but nothing but meth labs and he had to do uh he didn't do crime scene cleanup, but he he worked on teams that investigated sites, I think. And he said that he saw bodies that had dirt the body that they've shoveled dirt in their mouths and would choke on it sometimes because apparently once whatever badness happens and it becomes airborne, it's such a like awful re action like that you're breathing in this in they start just putting something in their mouth to try and quell this nasty taste, so they would like stuff dirt in their mouths until they died, not nasty. Said, that's horrible. It's another reason not to cook or do meth. What a mini um. So let's say you all this is like yeah, yeah, yeah, okay, and you're looking to earn no, I don't know, between thirty five and fifty grand without a high school diploma. We should say, um, what what do you need to do to become a crime scene clean up technician? Well, we already talked about some of the uh traits they look for in somebody, like to be empathetic and maybe to have prior training with the dead bodies and stuff like that. But they will actually give you test um to make sure that you won't like, throw up on the scene in front of a family. Yeah, it's like monster's ball. Yeah, that would be awful to go. Can you imagine losing a family member in your home and then someone coming in to clean it and then they start throwing up all over the place. Plus, if you're the owner of the company, that's just extra work, that's more clean up that you can't charge for, right, So they will actually put you through a test to pass a gross factor that um it ranges from like looking at pictures of dead bodies to actually cleaning up dead animals carcasses to make sure that you won't vomit. And I wonder if they tell you that it's actual like human stuff, but it's actually like a fox like Halloween when you when you reach into the shape grapes and their eyeballs. Yeah. Um, you also really really really need to get a hepatitis B vaccine every five years. As a matter of fact, as many letters as there are types of hepatitis I would get a vaccine for each of them, probably every month. Yeah, what do we get heap A for Guatemala so we can still wouldn't qualify huh. Um. Also, Chuck, even if you are a very strong person, we like we said, the turnovers about eight months on average, and you are um really at risk for a couple of stress disorders UM, critical incident stress syndrome and secondary traumatic stress disorder. Yeah, and basically the first one is you were on site of like horrific events routinely it's tough to shake off. And then the other one is if you become too attached to the families grief. You're you, you basically can leach off of their post traumatic stress disorder and have secondary stress disorder, secondary traumatic stress disorder. Yeah, they also obviously look for people going in that don't have any sort of like depressive disorders or things like that. That That probably wouldn't be a good job to put someone who was manic depressive to crimes and cleanup situation. It wouldn't chuck, not at all. Uh, let's talk about the business a little bit. I think you said six dollars an hour, but a room can, like a bloody room can cost up to like three thousand dollars to get clean. I thought it was three to six. Yeah, it's one to three. I misspoke. I'm sorry. Well, it could be six depends on how many people were killed in there. I mean, if it was a really nasty scene, it could be six, I'm sure. And you said also that the Crime Victim Reparation Act pays for agency agency pays for um, the cleaning bill. If it's a homicide, um, if it's I don't know if it's a suicide, because I know that insurance generally doesn't cover suicides for anything. But maybe if it's an accidental death or something like that. Your homeowners insurance will cover it. In most cases, you're not going to have to pay the bill. Um. And we said also that marketing and advertising can be tricky and touchy. Hotels and motels are the two largest businesses that have to deal with this, yeah, with suicide. So if you own a ctsdcon company, you probably go to every hotel and motel convention there is, which appropriately are held in hotels. Uh. And you hand out cards, right, You hand out cards to homicide detectives, You make friends with ambulance drivers. You just make sure that everybody's going to contact these families first if they're asked. You don't want to pimp in your card. But if if the families like what are we gonna do about this, that they can say, well, I know this guy is good. Yeah. That's actually how it worked in Sunshine Cleaning. Really. Yes, Amy Adams was a regular house cleaner making beans, and her boyfriend was steve'son and he was a homicide detective. Steven is great and he's awesome and he um. He he told her like, you know, you can make a lot more money by doing this, and he got her her first job and first for roll In. It just kind of grew from there. Um, it's a burgeoning business, right Yeah. And apparently if you like to name your business after yourself first and last name, this is the this is the industry for you. This in waste disposal. Yeah, what was the company from San Francisco in there? There is um Neil Smithers crime Scene Cleaners, Inc. Right, And and they have people they send out all over the country. Now, but I think it said that they do about four hundred cleanups in San Francisco alone each year. This is two thousand six. That's more than one a day. That's saying well, and here we reach to the debate, right, the crime scene cleanup companies literally make money off of tragedy, right, horrific tragedy. And a lot of people argue like that there's this kind of commercialization of death of tragedy, and and that why are we so okay with this? Um? And I can kind of see that maybe this is something that should be a free service of a police department, worked into the budget or something that a city does, right. Um, But at the same time, you can really make a case like if you need someone like this, it's a really good thing that they're around, whether it's a commercialization of death or not, because before this it was up to the family to do it right, or maybe some friends of the family or something like that. But isn't that just way way worse. I don't even cleaning up your loved one's brains in your home. Yeah, that's obviously way way worse. But like a private tot truck company comes and gets a car after car accident, so that's not taken care of by the police, so sort of sort of the same thing. I definitely fall in the line like, yeah, this is fine, this is perfectly acceptable capitalism. Yeah. Well, and until it is covered by the police department, then somebody's should be making money, and it should be top dollar because it's no one to clean up brains and bone out of drywall, you know, I know, And I mean if you leave it to the city, can you imagine the job a city worker would do. And well, that's the other point, man. These people are paid good money because they restore it to its original condition. And you're right, I would not want to see employee doing it. If you're a city employee who is good at your job. We apologize in advance. It's the rest of the people in your field that make it hard on you. UM. And if you are a crime scene cleanup technician, we want to hear from you. Uh. Send us an email uh to the email address that I will give at the end of the show because I got ahead of myself. If you want to learn more about crime scene clean up, go type that into our search bar. Crime scene is crime hyphen scene clean up is clean hyphen up uh, and we'll take you to this really really good article. UM. And that means now, friends, that it's time for listener mail. Jerry had a big problem with the hyphen thing, like you were. You were out of the room getting some coffee and I had to explain to the hyphens and that you have capitalized the first one and you don't capitalize the second. I can see that. And she said, this is the most difficult title we've ever had, Is it really? She said, she said, yes, Okay, she's tittering. Uh, Josh, this is prison email Part two. We had part one? Was it right before this one? Are we going to split those up? Uh? We have to have the one that we recorded go first, or else Who've got two and then one Okay, so yeah, this came out on this is Thursday. Right. That's more confusing than college football rankings in quantum physics. Uh so this is the end of the prisoners email the guy who was busted for math and then went on the lamb and then went to prison and is now an fine, upstanding citizen. We will continue with this. Food items available from the commissary like ramen noodles, can corn or chicken, and soda pop were valuable for trade as well. Pack of ramen noodles were often uses currency for bet on things like football games. She was betting rama noodles on a football game. I guess when you're in the whoscal, you're doing what you can to, you know, make it just like the outside. Or prizes and handball tournaments organized by enterprising inmates who would often keep five as an entry fee for putting the tournament together. Huh that crazy. I think it's crazy that this guy wasn't in a minimum security federal prison and he was still playing handball. Uh. There were two escapes during the year that I was at the camp. One person took a blanket and threw it over the top of the barbed war fence. That was just regular Barbara, he said, not razor wire, and he climbed over in the middle of the night and that was pretty much how he got out. Did they catch the guy? Uh? Yes, both were caught. The second guy left his job at the State and motor pool during the day, so I guess he just got one of the cars and left, which is pretty smart way to escape. It's a pretty typical way to escape. Again. Well, that's actually what he says. He stole a state vehicle and he said both were caught in under forty eight hours. Shank, and here's just some little points he makes. Shank is indeed both a bourbon and noun, although shiv was much less common in usage. Somebody said it was east coast, west coast, but another credibility, Well, this is Nevada, so shank is what they said there. Uh. In addition to the whole, the special housing unit was known as the Shoe as an s h U, and it was more frequently referred to as the shoe than the whole. So we were sort of wrong in that one. And one of the more colorful terms that you can here in prison was to keyster something. Yeah, and can you imagine what that might be. Of course, I mean to hide something in a very uncomfortable place. You're wrecked. Um yeah, not like this stop watch? Did you not know that you did? You get dysenterry from that when you put a watch in your keystar or a wrist watch. Sorry it wasn't a stop I got distant, teary little man. Another term was man walking, which meant that action officer was out in the yard walking around. So someone would yell out man walking, and that was a cue to hide any contraband or desist any activities like tattooing, which was you didn't want the corrections guys to see tattooing each other. They're heavy critics, exactly. I've already written much more than I intended. Guys. I could go on for much longer about many of the topics, including racism, which was extreme, the power structure, and what it was like not having freedom even though I worked outside the camp and mostly an unsupervised fashion. UH favored trading and so on and so on. It's weird that I have so much to write about, even though I was only in total for about eighteen months, so it wasn't three years. It was eighteen months. Totally ten months, man, can you imagine? Oh my god. So that's the end of part two of the prison prisoner email. It's part two of two. Huh yep. And he's on the up and up now and we wish him all the best. It sounds like he's doing really good. Thank you, anonymous jail bird. We appreciate you. Who doesn't work here? Right? It is not John Constructing. Okay, um, let's see if you have a we already did this this well email thing right, crime scene clean up? Just say the email address. Yeah, just send your emails to Stuff podcast at how stuff works dot com. For more on this and thousands of other topics, visit how stuff works dot com. Want more how stuff works, check out our blogs on the house stuff works dot com home page.

Hi, everybody. Chuck here with my select pick of the week, How crime scene Cleanup Works from September seven, two thousand ten. There's an oldie body goody and part of our probably not ever going to be finished sweet on crime and punishment, And this one was pretty good crime scene clean up. You never think about that. What happens, who goes in there, how's it done? What are the rules around crime scene clean up? And we detail all of that good stuff in this week's Selects episode. Welcome to Stuff you Should Know from house Stuff Works dot com. Hey, and welcome to the podcast. I'm Josh Clark. There's Charles W. Chuck Bryant, and h that makes the stuff you should know. Freshly shaven, m hm, I got rid of the beard. Yeah, I cleaned up this crime scene of the face. Your hair sticking on a really weird way? Is it out from my hat? Thank you? That's even crazier. Please don't like lick your thumb and come over like mommys the I should say for those of you who might be experiencing some sort of alarm or teror right now. Chuck kept the goatee. He just shaved the beard. Part of the parts that made it a beard. I guess the burnside mutton chops yea, and the neck fuzz Yeah, looking good, Thank you, Chuck. Have you ever seen a movie called Curdled No, it's a little sleeper produced by one Quentin Tarantino. It's about this very quiet, kind of demure woman who um gets a job as a crime scene clean up person. It's the girl from Pulp Fiction, the cab driver, right. I believe she. I believe she was the taxi driver who drove Bruce Willis around after the boxing match from Pulp Fiction. Really of that movie, I haven't seen it, but I think that's her. It's worth seeing, is it. But now that i've I've read this crime scene cleanup article on our fair site how stuff works dot com. Um, I realized just how far off the mark some of the details were on that was it pretty far? Yeah? A little bit. Have you seen Sunshine Cleaning? No, But from the previous that one looks pretty far off the mark to like, I remember seeing them carrying out like a mattress and just like you know, um, Mrs Brady spring cleaning type outfits. Yeah, you remember that she had like the little de rag and she had like the little clam diggers rolled up and like some converse on just like cute as a button. That was one of the jokes of the scenes. Actually, they were carrying out this Amy Adams and the other girl carrying out this nasty like bloody mattress and one of them dropped her end and the other one fell on the bloody stain and it was just like and it mate. It's really good movie though, actually was it? Yeah? It was great? Is it by the people who made um a little Miss Sunshine? Or am I just confusing that because sunt the name. It's a little indie though Alan Arkin was in it, so maybe so I wonder it's good? All right, Well, um, both of these movies are utter frauds when it comes to the details, right chuck uh yeah for the most part. Okay, let's talk about crime scene clean up, the real stuff, because there's nothing cute or about it. It's actually horrific work and it takes a very specific kind of person and the those people last in average of about eight months before they get burned out in this business, right yeah, all right, So it's actually called it's it's part of the cleaning industry and the it's a niche part of the cleaning industry, not very heavily marketed in traditional channels. Exactly, it's not how it works. Um. But it's called CTSD con Crime and Trauma Scene decontamination, right, and Um, basically what it is is it is a cleaning service on steroids. There's no Mrs Brady outfits. You're wearing full bio hazard has matt suits, no French Maids going on here, nothing like that, because you're dealing with some really dangerous stuff. You're dealing with um blow which often feature appropriately enough blood borne pathogens. Um, you're cleaning up meth labs. Yeah, that's a big one. Um, And a lot of times you're you're um And we should probably warn people this. This is gonna get a little graphic here. Sure, you can't do what I'm scene without being a little graphic, right, But I mean you're cleaning up like there may not be a body there anymore, but you're picking up pieces of bone that the the crime scene investigators missed. Um, you're scraping brain off of walls. It's not normal work, right, Yeah, I mean I think that's where the decontamination part of the CTS deacon comes in. It's not just cleaning, You're you're actually your goal is to return the spot to its original condition. So like you don't it made a point in this article, like you don't just clean the carpet because if the carpet has a two inch blood stain on the carpet, there's probably a two foot blood stain under the carpet on the floorboard. Right, Yeah, So cleaning the carpet doesn't work. You've gotta cut the carpet out, maybe cut the base base boards out, right, So it is decontaminations. Um who wrote this, Julia Layton, She's she's got the goods. She definitely has the goods, but the way she put it has to be actually clean, not just apparently clean, right yeah, which I do apparently cleaning in my house. But I mean we're not cutting up carpet and replacing floorboards or anything. Um So it takes a very certain type of person um because of the gore that you're going to have to deal with in a large number of your cases. Um So, a lot of the people in UM the ct S DACON industry or former or maybe even current e m t S emergency room nurses people who are already trained to deal with this kind of thing. Yeah, that that one articles And you know, I think that that company said they hire a lot of former firemen and I would think probably military people, people that have dealt with high stress and dead bodies. Yeah, basically, but it's not just that. I mean you have to um also is a crime scene clean up person. You have to have a sympathetic nature, is one of the points in this article. Right, sympathetic but not empathetic, right, because there's a lot of times when all the the the ambulance is gone, the cops are gone, but the family is still there and they may be sitting there sobbing while they're watching you clean the house. Um, and you you have to be able to, yeah, sympathize with them without getting caught up in and what they're experiencing. Right then you have to be able to remain detached, but you have to be um uh, you have to be understanding to what they're going through to Yeah. The one guy in that article that they interviewed said that he's cried along with families and stuff like that. And um, I think they also said that some companies offer grief counselors along with their service. Yeah, the upon request apparently, if you want a grief counselor usually that can be factored into the price or else the company will will give it to you for free. Yeah. In Sunshine Cleaning, there was never anyone at the scene, but um, it was realistic in some ways because one of the subplots involved UM. One of the girls found a wallet and an identification from the deceased and ended up looking up her daughter and befriending her daughter, but not telling the daughter that she had cleaned up her mother's suicide or homicide scene. So they kind of dealt with that, you know, delicately. That's great. Yeah, that's probably the one thing you should deal with delicately, right, Um, because some of the stuff that you're cleaning up is pretty rough stuff. So let's talk about the three main scenes that you're going to encounter as a UM clean up technician, Josh. Number one, you've got violent death, which is homicide, suicide or bad luck accident type of thing. You've got a decomposition, decomposing body happening, and meth labs is a lot of their business comes from meth labs that have exploded because meth labs are known for exploding. I don't even know that they necessarily have to have exploded. I think just the fact that there was a meth lab there, that's true. It means that you have to decontaminate the scene. Absolutely. Apparently meth labs um are so toxic that they're um capable of making people who live in a former meth lab sick, like a decade on um. Some of the toxins that you're running into our things like acetone, methanol, benzene, iodine, hydrochloric acid. This is like the ingredients of myth. Right, this is what people are snoring. Kids. Unless you want to turn into a disgusting, haggard wreck mess of a human, stay away from meth. Meth equals death. Just look at those pictures. You've seen those pictures on the internet that showed the before and after. Yeah, oh god, that that should be like on billboards in Oklahoma. We should talk a podcast on meth sometime. We have a good article. It's like Tom she wrote it. Yeah, we absolutely should. Um. So. One of the one of the reasons why meth labs are so dangerous is because you are going to absorb the stuff through your skin. It leaves a toxic breads to do, not just on walls, but on the air as well. So another um I guess prior job experience that is good to bring to the table if you're a crime scene clean up person is construction background or at the very least demolition, because a lot of cases, like with UM meth labs, like if it was a house or an apartment or something, you have to knock everything out. Anything that UM can't be put in some sort of decontaminating chemical. UM has to be taken out, thrown away. That includes drywall, floorboards, carpet, all this stuff until it's just down to the bones of the building. Yeah, or they will tear it down or more likely, uh, haul the trailer away. Well, let's talk about this. We said that you're not wearing UM just normal everyday spring cleaning clothes. You're wearing like full on biohezard suit. Right. What are some of the other um I guess tools of the trade, Chuckers, Well, there's there's a laundry list. Josh. You you definitely want your protective gear. UM. You have to have biowaste containers like big fifty five gallon drums to hold this stuff. You can't just throw it in a bag into the back of your van. There's regulations you gotta follow. Um, you're gonna have your regular cleaning supplies that you would need to clean up any kind of mess, you know, mops and disinfectants and that kind of thing. You've got your more hardcore supplies like industrial strength, like hospital strength, the disinfectants which only allow the merca bug to survive. Really now there's like hospital acquired mercer infections. I don't know anything about that. Yeah, or they like get used to the industrial cleaners and they're like these super bugs are like bring it. When you spray it on them, it's bad news. That's some ticks. You can have an ozone machine which removes odors. You can have a fogger which they will use to shoot um stuff into like air ducts to get rid of odors. Right, Well, it'll um. It takes a chemical and kind of gets it around corners and stuff. You get everywhere with it. When you have when you run it through a fogger, apparently you've got some enzyme solvents you want to kill bacteria, and it can also liquefied dried blood, which can be pretty nasty to get out once it's coagulated and dried, right, which is why you want shovels. Apparently chuck after what three hours two hours coagulates into kind of a jelly like goo that you can shovel into bags. So gross but very very thick bags biohazard bags. They also include in this article putty knives to scrape brain matter from the wall, because apparently brain when it dries becomes like cement, and we'll stick to something like cement, which is really gross and sad. You can also use um a steam basically a steamer to steam it back into gooiness. Yeah. And then my favorite thing, which is be the first thing in my van, would be the no touch cleaning system. And these are like big long scrubbing brushes, uh, heavy duty sprayers, things like that, like pressure washers and no touch cleaning system seems like the smartest cleaning system, yes it is. Yeah. Then, like you said, you want some carponry tools, probably ladders, stuff like that, and then a camera because you need to take before and after pictures for insurance, and you wouldn't think about that, right, And actually Apparently most insurance covers this, right, Yeah, insurance covers it a lot of times. Or if it's a homicide, I think it's paid for by the state, by the federal government really Crime Victory Victim Reparations Agency. Okay, and I know the state agencies that do that too, So well, we're getting aheir of ourselves. I don't mean to jump the gun, but let's talk more about some of the scenes. Specifically, we talked about meth labs, Chuck, one of the other big ones that you'll be called out to. That makes quite a message when a decomposing body is found, right, absolutely, he had to call him de comps in the in the trade. Uh, that's not gonna be like usually, it's not gonna be some big nasty um blood sprays and like brains and things. It's not gonna be all over the place, but it can be pretty nasty because a decomposing body, Josh, is really gross. Your body swells up, um insects move into your body and take up residence. Your organs are going to digest themselves, and your skin liquefies. Yeah, remember we talked about um rigor mortis or no, I think it was On the Body Farms episode, we talked a lot about how decomposition works. So if you want to know more about d COMP go listen to our Body Farms, Um eppie right, Yeah, And of course there's the smell. You can't talk about decomposition without the smell. No, And as Julia Layton puts it, it would bring an average person to his knees. Yeah, that's bad. Yes, apparently it's ammonia. It's an ammonia based smell created by d COMP like the litter box. Yeah, you ever cleaned out of litter box? Sure, I have toxic plasmos is all over the place, that's right. Um. The other thing too with a d COMP is and this you know, you don't think about these things when you hear about it on the news. But someone actually has to go behind after the body has been removed. There's probably liquefied parts of the body there, and there's also maggots that have already feasted and have the blood inside of them, and you gotta get it. You gotta get rid of them too, because they're carrying you know, disease maybe right, And so you have to basically scour the place looking for maggots, collect the maggots, and then you dispose of them through burning. Right, tastes like burning. That's dcompey, that's D. Now let's get down to the one that everybody's fascinated with that all the movies are about. And those are murder scenes, suicide scenes, accidental shootings, basically where somebody was shot it's specifically in the head, I guess is the worst. I mean, you've seen Full Metal Jacket, right, remember pile. Yeah, someone had to clean that up. Somebody did. Yeah, I'll bet it was a joker. Well, somebody in the art department for the movie. But uh, yeah, a violent death is not good because there's gonna be lots of blood. Especially suicides they say are probably the worst for the blood. Yeah, which is why I guess. I can't see shooting yourself in the head at home. That's just so so much of a problem. It's just a huge problem. At least go to a hotel or a motel. And that Hunter Thompson did, he shot himself in his basement while he's on the phone with his wife. But I mean, I think it's fine for him that he was on the phone with her because apparently he'd let her know that this was happening. This wasn't like she had no idea that something like this was going to happen, but at home. He did it at home, which I can understand wanting to be at home. But yeah, I guess shooting yourself in the head if you're going to why, I don't see why you would do it at home. Yeah, I agree. Uh, And like we said earlier, it has to be really really clean. So any bodily fluid is a potential pathogen. And not only that, but after you leave, if you don't get it all up, it can lead to mold and bacteria and cause people to get sick like months afterward. Yeah. Yeah, yeah, you have to, like you said, restore this place to the state it was in before the trigger was pulled, right, Yeah, And it can take up to, I mean a few hours to up to like forty eight hours to do this. Yeah. And apparently a good crime scene clean up company is gonna charge you about six hundred bucks an hour. Yeah, it ain't cheap um for one room with lots of blood for a homicide or suicide, it's gonna cost you between three and sixth grand I guess right. Yeah. One of the reasons why it's so expensive is because these people don't just take the stuff home and throw it in their trash out front. Right. There are really specific permits and rules that govern disposal of this which, by the way, we should say the actual industry itself is not regulated. Yeah, it's not nationally regulated. No, but they generally follow Ocean's bloodborne pathogen standards, which requires training and certification itself. Um. But to be a crime scene cleanup technician that you don't there's no national certification or even state or local certification. It's just company training. Yeah yeah, right, and but I'm you know, we'll talk about the training in a minute. But they obviously want to do a good job because the last thing you want is I mean, the turnover is already high enough, you know. Um. But like we said, there is plenty of permits and um standards and procedures to follow in disposing of this waste. Right. Yeah, you can't just like you said, you can't throw in the dumpster like they do in Sunshine cleaning. You have to incenterate it. And there are medical waste incinerator companies and uh, the one thing I thought they charged by the pound, which I thought was kind of gross. But how else are you going to do it? Because it's a pound of nastiness. Yeah, And the other thing I thought was kind of gross was they a lot of them have minimum charges. So if you don't have the minimum you have to keep this uh bio human bio waste in your van, well, not in your van, but if it's hot and in like a refrigerated space until you have collect enough of it to go to the incinerator. You know, I'll bet it's funny. I'll bet the same um, the same companies that that operate medical waste incinerators also just so happen to have some cold storage units that you can put your waist in until you have enough to burn. To be smart, but I'll bet it's I'll bet if you're in the industry for a while, you're friends with some guy who operates it, and you kick them like fifty bucks to throw your stuff in with somebody else's or whatever. But you better be incinerating it following proper procedure else you're a horrible jerk, right, Yes, And it's not just the goal where that has to be disposed of. Um, If you have just deconstructed a house that was a meth lab. You've got to do something with this waste again. Can't just take it to the dumpster you came and take it to a normal dump. You have to take it to special dumps that are um out of public reach, right right right? Um, and just transporting it you have to have a special permit for that, right, you have to have a has Met permit. Yeah, my friend, uh, my friend Timmy has he works in has Matt Disposal And now yeah you met Timmy. Now he does a lot of um like trained derailments and stuff like that. But he used to live in Oklahoma, and in Oklahoma nothing but nothing but meth labs and he had to do uh he didn't do crime scene cleanup, but he he worked on teams that investigated sites, I think. And he said that he saw bodies that had dirt the body that they've shoveled dirt in their mouths and would choke on it sometimes because apparently once whatever badness happens and it becomes airborne, it's such a like awful re action like that you're breathing in this in they start just putting something in their mouth to try and quell this nasty taste, so they would like stuff dirt in their mouths until they died, not nasty. Said, that's horrible. It's another reason not to cook or do meth. What a mini um. So let's say you all this is like yeah, yeah, yeah, okay, and you're looking to earn no, I don't know, between thirty five and fifty grand without a high school diploma. We should say, um, what what do you need to do to become a crime scene clean up technician? Well, we already talked about some of the uh traits they look for in somebody, like to be empathetic and maybe to have prior training with the dead bodies and stuff like that. But they will actually give you test um to make sure that you won't like, throw up on the scene in front of a family. Yeah, it's like monster's ball. Yeah, that would be awful to go. Can you imagine losing a family member in your home and then someone coming in to clean it and then they start throwing up all over the place. Plus, if you're the owner of the company, that's just extra work, that's more clean up that you can't charge for, right, So they will actually put you through a test to pass a gross factor that um it ranges from like looking at pictures of dead bodies to actually cleaning up dead animals carcasses to make sure that you won't vomit. And I wonder if they tell you that it's actual like human stuff, but it's actually like a fox like Halloween when you when you reach into the shape grapes and their eyeballs. Yeah. Um, you also really really really need to get a hepatitis B vaccine every five years. As a matter of fact, as many letters as there are types of hepatitis I would get a vaccine for each of them, probably every month. Yeah, what do we get heap A for Guatemala so we can still wouldn't qualify huh. Um. Also, Chuck, even if you are a very strong person, we like we said, the turnovers about eight months on average, and you are um really at risk for a couple of stress disorders UM, critical incident stress syndrome and secondary traumatic stress disorder. Yeah, and basically the first one is you were on site of like horrific events routinely it's tough to shake off. And then the other one is if you become too attached to the families grief. You're you, you basically can leach off of their post traumatic stress disorder and have secondary stress disorder, secondary traumatic stress disorder. Yeah, they also obviously look for people going in that don't have any sort of like depressive disorders or things like that. That That probably wouldn't be a good job to put someone who was manic depressive to crimes and cleanup situation. It wouldn't chuck, not at all. Uh, let's talk about the business a little bit. I think you said six dollars an hour, but a room can, like a bloody room can cost up to like three thousand dollars to get clean. I thought it was three to six. Yeah, it's one to three. I misspoke. I'm sorry. Well, it could be six depends on how many people were killed in there. I mean, if it was a really nasty scene, it could be six, I'm sure. And you said also that the Crime Victim Reparation Act pays for agency agency pays for um, the cleaning bill. If it's a homicide, um, if it's I don't know if it's a suicide, because I know that insurance generally doesn't cover suicides for anything. But maybe if it's an accidental death or something like that. Your homeowners insurance will cover it. In most cases, you're not going to have to pay the bill. Um. And we said also that marketing and advertising can be tricky and touchy. Hotels and motels are the two largest businesses that have to deal with this, yeah, with suicide. So if you own a ctsdcon company, you probably go to every hotel and motel convention there is, which appropriately are held in hotels. Uh. And you hand out cards, right, You hand out cards to homicide detectives, You make friends with ambulance drivers. You just make sure that everybody's going to contact these families first if they're asked. You don't want to pimp in your card. But if if the families like what are we gonna do about this, that they can say, well, I know this guy is good. Yeah. That's actually how it worked in Sunshine Cleaning. Really. Yes, Amy Adams was a regular house cleaner making beans, and her boyfriend was steve'son and he was a homicide detective. Steven is great and he's awesome and he um. He he told her like, you know, you can make a lot more money by doing this, and he got her her first job and first for roll In. It just kind of grew from there. Um, it's a burgeoning business, right Yeah. And apparently if you like to name your business after yourself first and last name, this is the this is the industry for you. This in waste disposal. Yeah, what was the company from San Francisco in there? There is um Neil Smithers crime Scene Cleaners, Inc. Right, And and they have people they send out all over the country. Now, but I think it said that they do about four hundred cleanups in San Francisco alone each year. This is two thousand six. That's more than one a day. That's saying well, and here we reach to the debate, right, the crime scene cleanup companies literally make money off of tragedy, right, horrific tragedy. And a lot of people argue like that there's this kind of commercialization of death of tragedy, and and that why are we so okay with this? Um? And I can kind of see that maybe this is something that should be a free service of a police department, worked into the budget or something that a city does, right. Um, But at the same time, you can really make a case like if you need someone like this, it's a really good thing that they're around, whether it's a commercialization of death or not, because before this it was up to the family to do it right, or maybe some friends of the family or something like that. But isn't that just way way worse. I don't even cleaning up your loved one's brains in your home. Yeah, that's obviously way way worse. But like a private tot truck company comes and gets a car after car accident, so that's not taken care of by the police, so sort of sort of the same thing. I definitely fall in the line like, yeah, this is fine, this is perfectly acceptable capitalism. Yeah. Well, and until it is covered by the police department, then somebody's should be making money, and it should be top dollar because it's no one to clean up brains and bone out of drywall, you know, I know, And I mean if you leave it to the city, can you imagine the job a city worker would do. And well, that's the other point, man. These people are paid good money because they restore it to its original condition. And you're right, I would not want to see employee doing it. If you're a city employee who is good at your job. We apologize in advance. It's the rest of the people in your field that make it hard on you. UM. And if you are a crime scene cleanup technician, we want to hear from you. Uh. Send us an email uh to the email address that I will give at the end of the show because I got ahead of myself. If you want to learn more about crime scene clean up, go type that into our search bar. Crime scene is crime hyphen scene clean up is clean hyphen up uh, and we'll take you to this really really good article. UM. And that means now, friends, that it's time for listener mail. Jerry had a big problem with the hyphen thing, like you were. You were out of the room getting some coffee and I had to explain to the hyphens and that you have capitalized the first one and you don't capitalize the second. I can see that. And she said, this is the most difficult title we've ever had, Is it really? She said, she said, yes, Okay, she's tittering. Uh, Josh, this is prison email Part two. We had part one? Was it right before this one? Are we going to split those up? Uh? We have to have the one that we recorded go first, or else Who've got two and then one Okay, so yeah, this came out on this is Thursday. Right. That's more confusing than college football rankings in quantum physics. Uh so this is the end of the prisoners email the guy who was busted for math and then went on the lamb and then went to prison and is now an fine, upstanding citizen. We will continue with this. Food items available from the commissary like ramen noodles, can corn or chicken, and soda pop were valuable for trade as well. Pack of ramen noodles were often uses currency for bet on things like football games. She was betting rama noodles on a football game. I guess when you're in the whoscal, you're doing what you can to, you know, make it just like the outside. Or prizes and handball tournaments organized by enterprising inmates who would often keep five as an entry fee for putting the tournament together. Huh that crazy. I think it's crazy that this guy wasn't in a minimum security federal prison and he was still playing handball. Uh. There were two escapes during the year that I was at the camp. One person took a blanket and threw it over the top of the barbed war fence. That was just regular Barbara, he said, not razor wire, and he climbed over in the middle of the night and that was pretty much how he got out. Did they catch the guy? Uh? Yes, both were caught. The second guy left his job at the State and motor pool during the day, so I guess he just got one of the cars and left, which is pretty smart way to escape. It's a pretty typical way to escape. Again. Well, that's actually what he says. He stole a state vehicle and he said both were caught in under forty eight hours. Shank, and here's just some little points he makes. Shank is indeed both a bourbon and noun, although shiv was much less common in usage. Somebody said it was east coast, west coast, but another credibility, Well, this is Nevada, so shank is what they said there. Uh. In addition to the whole, the special housing unit was known as the Shoe as an s h U, and it was more frequently referred to as the shoe than the whole. So we were sort of wrong in that one. And one of the more colorful terms that you can here in prison was to keyster something. Yeah, and can you imagine what that might be. Of course, I mean to hide something in a very uncomfortable place. You're wrecked. Um yeah, not like this stop watch? Did you not know that you did? You get dysenterry from that when you put a watch in your keystar or a wrist watch. Sorry it wasn't a stop I got distant, teary little man. Another term was man walking, which meant that action officer was out in the yard walking around. So someone would yell out man walking, and that was a cue to hide any contraband or desist any activities like tattooing, which was you didn't want the corrections guys to see tattooing each other. They're heavy critics, exactly. I've already written much more than I intended. Guys. I could go on for much longer about many of the topics, including racism, which was extreme, the power structure, and what it was like not having freedom even though I worked outside the camp and mostly an unsupervised fashion. UH favored trading and so on and so on. It's weird that I have so much to write about, even though I was only in total for about eighteen months, so it wasn't three years. It was eighteen months. Totally ten months, man, can you imagine? Oh my god. So that's the end of part two of the prison prisoner email. It's part two of two. Huh yep. And he's on the up and up now and we wish him all the best. It sounds like he's doing really good. Thank you, anonymous jail bird. We appreciate you. Who doesn't work here? Right? It is not John Constructing. Okay, um, let's see if you have a we already did this this well email thing right, crime scene clean up? Just say the email address. Yeah, just send your emails to Stuff podcast at how stuff works dot com. For more on this and thousands of other topics, visit how stuff works dot com. Want more how stuff works, check out our blogs on the house stuff works dot com home page.