BY LESLIE WIMMER
Kalyn Peterson runs her business from an unmarked white truck filled with industrial cleaning supplies and power tools. Her truck often pulls up after ambulances and squad cars leave traumatic scenes, and she spends hours cleaning what would turn many people’s stomachs.
Peterson’s business, Anubis SceneClean Inc., specializes in cleaning up after a suicide, homicide, crime scene, natural death and human or animal decomposition. The company also cleans “gross filth” homes – homes where a resident has compulsive hoarding syndrome – and biohazards in jails and squad cars including blood, spit, vomit and various infections such as staph.
Anubis is “a Greek god that helps people move from life into death, and that’s kind of how I think of the service I provide,” Peterson said.
Peterson first found the need for her business when a family friend’s son committed suicide. It took 10 days for the family to clean up the mess, she said.
“I thought: ‘How awful is that for someone to have to do that with a family member,’” Peterson said.
Peterson is certified in biohazard remediation and operates under federal Occupational Safety and Health Administration requirements, she said. The health administration training taught her how to clean biohazards off of
all kinds of surfaces and how to protect her employees and clients from sicknesses from biohazard materials. She and her brother are the company’s two full-time employees, and Peterson has a list of people she calls when she needs more help.
Her job is more physical than mental, Peterson said. She considers blood and body fluids to be “just stuff,” she said, and concentrates on making sure family members don’t have to endure cleaning the scenes.
“I’ve always wanted to do something where I look back on my life and I made a difference somewhere, I didn’t just go through the motions,” Peterson said. “And this, I truly believe in it and that’s why the stuff doesn’t bother me, because I’m helping people.”
Jobs can take anywhere from two hours for cleaning small amounts of blood to several days and heavy labor for methamphetamine lab decontamination, gross filth or human decomposition, she said.
“We had a woman who fell in her bathroom and she decomposed for several months before the landlord found her, it left a pretty big mess to clean up,” Peterson said. “That’s when we have to remove tubs, tiles, walls, sheetrock, counters and toilets, just depending on where the fluids go we have to follow that and decontaminate it or the odor will stay and the biohazards will stay.”
Customers often tell her that before they found her business, they thought police cleaned up biohazard scenes, she said. When police leave a scene, they can’t suggest a particular company to families or land owners, but they can give out lists of businesses and phone numbers, she said.
Peterson hopes people will hire a trained clean up company, even if it isn’t hers, so family members don’t have to look at the mess and the biohazards are properly removed.
Texas does not have strict laws covering biohazard clean up or regulations for biohazard clean up companies, Peterson said.
“You can get a pick up and a bottle of bleach and call yourself a crime scene clean up company in Texas,” Peterson said.
The state has no regulations for companies involved in cleaning crime scenes, and there is no regulatory oversight organization, said Emily Palmer, spokeswoman for the Texas Department of State Health Services. The Health Administration does have rules that pertain to employee safety for the companies, Palmer said.
Kenneth Brown owns KRI Crime Scene Cleanup, based in Dallas, and has been pushing for tighter biohazard clean up laws in Texas because people can get sick from improperly cleaning scenes, he said. Brown will open a Fort Worth location in April.
Both Brown and Peterson have heard of landowners spraying blood off outside surfaces, such as sidewalks, with water hoses, which doesn’t actually clean the area or get rid of diseases or infections in the body fluids.
“Let’s say you hose it off and you get it at the edge of the dirt and concrete, and let’s say your son comes through there skateboarding and happens to slip and fall where this happened and scrape himself, he can catch what was in the body fluids,” Brown said.
When Peterson is at a job, any material with body fluids on it is bagged and placed in a “red box,” which is a cardboard box labeled biohazard with a red plastic lining. Materials can include paper towels, pillows and sheets, sections of carpet or tile. Peterson uses the power tools in her truck to cut contaminated mattresses, furniture and building material apart to fit in the boxes.
When a box is full, an outside company picks up the red boxes and takes them to an incinerator instead of a trash dump.
The cost for cleaning up a biohazard scene can range from $500 to $10,000, depending on the amount of red boxes, equipment used and labor, Peterson said. About 40 percent of insurance companies cover the cost of clean up, she said.
Peterson opened Anubis in August of 2004. She got her first job in December of 2004 cleaning the front lawn of a church where vandals stole trash bags from a dentist’s office and spread bloody gauze around the area.
“Since I started doing this I tell everybody now: Go check on your family members,” Peterson said.
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