Crime/trauma scene cleanup job is better than Eikaiwa

[Taro Toporific]

Oh, gross: A job I couldn't bear
Dallas Morning News (vile "free" subscription required), TX -
09:18 PM CDT on Monday, August 16, 2004
Michael Tillman's students have to be tough. During a class last week, the group shouldered in close for a sober view of training exhibit A, a beat-up mattress soaked to the springs with partially congealed blood and studded with flecks of tissue and bone. They listened earnestly as the lecture commenced. I edged toward the door and fought a powerful urge to vomit.
It wasn't the worst the students would see and smell that day – they had yet to cover "decomp," Mr. Tillman's brisk shorthand for the natural effluvia produced by a corpse in the later stages of decay – and they were paying $1,400 apiece for the privilege....
One woman who said she has an undergraduate degree in literature from Texas A&M told me that she spent the last five years in Japan teaching English. She wants a career change, and she figures that decontaminating trauma scenes is a valuable service.
"Someone has to do it," she said matter-of-factly. "If you think you can handle it, you can help people who can't."

[Taro Toporific]

Dallas Morning News (vile "free" subscription required), TX -
09:18 PM CDT on Monday, August 16, 2004

Full text because the "free" subscription required does not work in many browsers like FireFox.


Oh, gross: A job I couldn't bear

09:18 PM CDT on Monday, August 16, 2004

JACQUIELYNN FLOYD / The Dallas Morning News

Michael Tillman's students have to be tough. During a class last week, the group shouldered in close for a sober view of training exhibit A, a beat-up mattress soaked to the springs with partially congealed blood and studded with flecks of tissue and bone.

They listened earnestly as the lecture commenced. I edged toward the door and fought a powerful urge to vomit.

It wasn't the worst the students would see and smell that day – they had yet to cover "decomp," Mr. Tillman's brisk shorthand for the natural effluvia produced by a corpse in the later stages of decay – and they were paying $1,400 apiece for the privilege. By the end of the week, they meant to be experts in cleaning up and sanitizing real-life horror scenes of death and mayhem.

Most of Mr. Tillman's quarterly 40-hour course in "CTS" (for crime/trauma scene) cleanup is spent in the classroom, memorizing OSHA laws and studying chemical solvents and blood borne pathogens.

But the class everybody talks about is demonstration day, a kind of shock immersion in what the promotional literature for the seminar calls "all the visuals and odors of an actual trauma scene."

Mr. Tillman understands the marketing value of shock effect: He unnerved a lot of people last year by putting up roadside billboards featuring a chalk outline of a dead body to advertise the services of his company, Biohazard Solutions.

I was of two minds about the billboard business. On one hand, it seemed insensitive, even vulgar to insinuate that the murder or suicide of a human being is a pesky nuisance on par with a stopped-up sink. The breezy "who-ya-gonna-call?" tone of the billboards was eye-catching, but it sure wasn't tasteful.

On the other hand, I had to wonder what you're supposed to do about a place that, once the authorities are gone, still reflects the evidence of undisguised horror – burn the house down?

So I suppose that if you can get past Mr. Tillman's eagerness to promote his singular craft, you can accept its necessity. A lot of other people do, too: Most of the students at his quarterly seminars want either to launch their own businesses or to expand existing hazardous-material cleanup operations to include crime and trauma scenes.

They were a varied lot. There were a couple of firemen from Cleveland who operate an environmental cleanup service on the side and want to expand the business. There was a husband-and-wife team that wants to add trauma scene cleanup to their janitorial company's services.

One woman who said she has an undergraduate degree in literature from Texas A&M told me that she spent the last five years in Japan teaching English. She wants a career change, and she figures that decontaminating trauma scenes is a valuable service.

"Someone has to do it," she said matter-of-factly. "If you think you can handle it, you can help people who can't."

A lady from Panama City, Fla., told me she learned that point the hard way.

"My father committed suicide in 1965, when I was 16," she said flatly. "He shot himself.

"We had to clean it up – there was nobody else to do it. As far as I'm concerned, no family should have to do that, ever."

There's actually a surprising lack of legal regulation for crime scene cleanup, although most states and cities have laws for the disposition of waste that could pose a biological hazard. Mr. Tillman said he has largely developed his techniques through five years of trial and error in the business – enough, he says, to teach other people to safely scrub down and decontaminate sites of hideous carnage.

His training "mock-ups," all staged at a warehouse in an industrial neighborhood in eastern Irving, are sickeningly realistic. A series of life-sized one-room tableaux were lined up in a row, like open windows into hell.

Each room was furnished to look like a cheap apartment or a room in a cruddy motel: old TV set, chair, bed, dime-store decoration. Each one was spattered with gore as if somebody had dumped it out of buckets (they had – Mr. Tillman and his assistants buy animal blood and parts from ethnic markets for use in the demonstrations).

Since movies and even television don't hold much back anymore, most people probably think they have a pretty good idea of what a crime scene is like.

They know what it looks like. But they don't know about the smell, or the flies, or the busy maggot colonies that follow death. They don't know about the cruel pathos of everyday objects encrusted with dried blood and splinters of bone. It made me wonder whether people bent on suicide would think twice if they knew what the raw reality would really be.

The students were admirably businesslike. Rule one, logically, is that you have to protect yourself: They carefully donned heavy disposable jumpsuits and booties, elastic caps, plastic face shields and double-layered gloves sealed with duct tape at the wrists. They were carefully schooled in procedures to minimize any risk of contamination.

Yet you can't scrub the memory of the sight out of your eyes, or the recollection of the shocking stink out of your nostrils. This just isn't a job for everybody.

As the students broke into teams to tackle the trauma rooms, Mr. Tillman called out above the chatter: "Remember, people, fluids can seep under the baseboards. And remember to check inside every drawer – if a family member sees one single drop, all your hard work is wasted."

It's hard work, all right, harder than I think I could do. I said so long and left the class to its task.

Outside, a brief shower had soaked the air with the scent of wet asphalt parking lot.

Dizzy with relief, I sucked in a deep breath. It was as sweet as honeysuckle.

E-mail jfloyd@dallasnews.com

Online at: http://www.dallasnews.com/sharedcontent/dws/dn/localnews/columnists/jfloyd/stories/081704dnmetfloyd.c8e2.html

[Socratesabroad]

And on the topic of the career change to crime scene cleanup...

Here's a bit of what to expect:

Crime Scene
July 7, 2000
Act Two. Grime Scene. Reporter Nancy Updike spends two days with Neal Smither, who cleans up crime scenes for a living, and comes away wanting to open his Los Angeles franchise, despite the gore--or maybe because of it.

http://207.70.82.73/pages/descriptions/00/164.html