Mobile Firm Cleans Up Some of the Area’s Most Disturbing Messes

When Jessica Townsend was a little girl, she wanted to be a nurse when she grew up. She says she just wanted to help people. Though her career plans changed, the profession she ultimately chose allows her to do just that, but in a rather unconventional way.

As the owner of Gulf Coast Bio Clean, a company she founded nearly six years ago, she and her team of crime scene cleaners try to erase the blood and gore left behind after someone passes away – by their own hand or the hand of others, or just from natural causes.

“Most people assume police or EMS personnel clean crime scenes, they do not. Trauma can occur if a family member is forced to clean after the death of a loved one. We perform the cleaning, with care to the family’s property, as well as their feelings at this time of loss. This will probably be the most traumatic time in their lives, and I am glad we are there to help them,” Townsend explains in her company bio.

A combination of her education and professional background led her to what most people consider a fairly odd job.

“I have a bachelor’s degree in criminal justice, and I worked on the ambulance for a while, so I knew I could pretty much handle anything. I didn’t want to sit behind a desk, so I knew this was a way I could help people.”

But it’s not as easy as just picking up a sponge and a pair of rubber gloves. There are classes you must attend to be certified by the American Biorecovery Association. There are schools in Ohio, Massachusetts and South Carolina.

“You apply and go to classes. You research all of the national, state and local guidelines. You learn what those are and you have to do an internship,” Townsend explained.

She said a crime scene cleaning company does not legally have to be certified to clean a private residence, and there are several in town who aren’t, but if the tragedy occurs in an apartment or other place that will be transferred to another person, the cleaners must have this certification.

One such guideline they learn while getting certified is that “extraction is not an effective means of decontamination.” Surprisingly, they don’t use any sort of shampooers, steamers or any other commercial cleaning machines, as one might expect. They simply remove the entire affected area using saws, Sawzalls, crowbars, flat bars, screwdrivers, carpet cutters or whatever tool it takes to get the area removed.

“You have to have some construction knowledge to do this job. If you are following fluid under a wall, you have to know whether or not that wall is a load-bearing wall before you tear into it,” she explained.

Even though the body has been removed by the time her team gets there, she says you also have to be able to stomach what’s left. Obviously, there is often blood and tissue. But there are also other eerie reminders that something sinister and/or sad has just occurred.

“If it’s a crime, we will see crime scene tape and finger print dust. If it’s a trauma, we see evidence of where the paramedics have tried to resuscitate them,” she explained.

Along with a strong constitution and basic building knowledge, Townsend requires her employees to be able to lift 75 lbs. over their heads, which is why she says the majority of her employees are male.

“This is a very physical job, we are often moving furniture, removing flooring, working over our heads for hours, removing sheetrock, and we spend the majority of our time meticulously looking for fluids to assure we have covered all areas that may have been involved, all while wearing respirators, biohazard suits and gloves,” she explained. Those suits are heavy, she says, and they get quite hot in the middle of a Port City summer.

“It’s just hard for people to be able to physically handle the job. Some people try, but they just can’t do it,” she said.

Once they remove all of the affected sheetrock, carpet, hardwood or other contaminated materials, they take it to Stericycle, a local company that specializes in disposing of biohazardous waste.

“When we leave the scene, it’s not as though nothing ever happened, it’s not completely back to normal, because there is carpet, flooring or sections of wall missing, but it’s safe,” she says. They use lights and certain chemicals to make sure everything is eradicated before they leave.

Most of their calls are to primary residences, but she says she occasionally gets calls to do cars or RVs.

The first time
With all of her training and background, Townsend said her first call was still very emotionally trying. “I was nervous, just because it was brand new, and as with any new job, you want everything to go perfectly.”

The victim was a young kid who had committed suicide in his bedroom.

Suicides, she says, especially those of young people, are still the most difficult for her to deal with emotionally.

“It’s just like they say, ‘it’s a permanent solution to a temporary problem.’ And you think about the prospect of them having the rest of their lives in front of them, and it being cut short like that. For someone to take their own life, it just kills me.”

She says it’s hard to see a family going through this awful situation.

“It just devastates the family to no end, because they are always wondering if there was something they could have done.”

And as with this first case, she just tries to walk in with blinders on when on these types of calls. She doesn’t look at photos or the belongings of the victim. She just heads immediately to the scene and gets started, which makes it easier

“The first case really wasn’t that bad (as far as the clean-up), looking back on it now and comparing it to some of the jobs we have done, but I was nervous, and I just felt so bad for the family.”

However, dealing with his family and others is what made her realize she was in the right place.

“We try to take care of as much as we can for the families. Like one guy, his wife had been killed and he just couldn’t return to his house. He was like, ‘I just can’t go in there.’ But he had two dogs, and they lived out in the country. So I went out there and fed them until he was able to go back. And that just makes you feel good — to be able to help them like that.”

The worst time
Though the crew is usually called almost immediately to clean up a scene, there are times when bodies go days or weeks without being found. They call those situations “unattended deaths.”

She said it is interesting to see the difference between what is left at those kinds of scenes, as compared to the ones that are cleaned up almost immediately.

“Fifty-three days is the longest a body (had been decomposing) before we were called. That was a valuable learning experience. Two weeks versus 53 days, there’s a lot of difference in what you find and the methods you use.”

Though their biohazard suits protect them from the smell most of the time, it is usually impossible to avoid it entirely.

“You can’t smell it through the suit with the respirator, but you have to take a break (because the suits are so heavy and cumbersome), and when you take it off, you will get a whiff of it, and that’s all you need.”

CSI: Mobile
It is after crime scene investigators have dusted all of the surfaces and collected all of their samples when she comes in, but she has found stuff they have overlooked before, including a potential murder weapon. “We found a knife. It was very well hidden though. I was going up in the attic to see if it was a load-bearing wall (before they removed it) and the knife had been thrown up in the attic. If I hadn’t been checking for that, no one would have ever found it,” she said.

Meth Lab Decontamination They are also certified to clean up other undesirable situations, such as meth labs that have been busted. Townsend says they typically swab the area and send it to the lab, and await a report on the contamination level, which she says determines the extent of cleaning that must be performed.

“If the levels are not high, we can simply decon the property, but if they are high we remove everything in the property down to the studs of the walls.”

She added the only time she has ever been scared doing this job was while decontaminating one of these labs.

“The cooker had gotten out of jail fairly quickly and came back and wanted his stuff. We called the police and said ‘Hey, ya’ll need to get back down here because we’re cleaning up a meth lab and the cooker is back.” The police responded, and they were OK, but she said it was still frightening.

They are not only called after a meth lab has been busted but also by prospective homebuyers and tenants. “We are often approached by prospective home buyers wanting to have a residence tested before they purchase a property or by those looking to rent an apartment to assure the property is safe,” she said, especially in cases where this activity was suspected and had been disclosed to the potential owner/renter.

Animal Trauma
Townsend is an avid animal lover and has a tough time responding to these personally, but she has had calls to clean up blood after a pet has been traumatized in some way.

“I had this lady who had two pit bulls, and one attacked the other one in her home and killed it, and there was blood all over her house. That was too hard for me, as an animal lover, so I sent two of my employees, and we got it cleaned up for her.”

Hoarders
Another service they provide is performing cleaning services for hoarding situations. “This is where junk or trash is kept for a long period of time to the extent it has an impact on the hoarder’s health or they are living in unsanitary conditions. We work closely with family members and mental health care workers, if they are involved, to help remove clutter, junk and trash from, their home, yard or automobiles,” she said.

“We have people call us that the city has told them, ‘Clean this up or we are going to fine you.’ So they’ll hire us or a family member will hire us. Or a family member who is just concerned will call us,” she said. “We know it is a mental condition so we try to be as sensitive as we can, and we have their family member or psychiatrist with us.”

What do most people hoard?
“Books, magazines from 30 years ago or newspapers from last year. And just garbage. Their whole kitchen will just get full. It starts off innocently enough with one garbage can, and that will get full and then they’ll just put a bag of garbage beside it and on and on and on. It starts off innocently and then it just keeps escalating,” she says.

Freezer Failure
If a restaurant or home’s freezers fail and there is rotting food, they will also remove it. “With restaurants, they have to have us come and use a food-safe product to decontaminate their freezers, before they can start back up.”

Coverage
Townsend serves Mobile and Baldwin counties and from about Montgomery south in Alabama and about the same area in Mississippi, and they have worked for a variety of people across the socioeconomic spectrum.

“We’ve done jobs for judges and jobs for garbage men and jobs for people who don’t work and are on disability.”

Homeowners or renters insurance covers about 90 percent of the claims. She just instructs the families to call their companies and let them know what has happened and then the adjustor calls her, and she handles it from there. Though Jessica Townsend isn’t nursing people back to health, as she once thought she would, she still gets an enormous amount of satisfaction out of her unorthodox career and the services she gets to provide to people in their times of need.

“We are there when people need us most,” she says.