Luke Skywalker
Super Moderator
{vb:raw ozzmodz_postquote}:
To follow Dale Cillian as he works is to witness the goriest details of the human demise. Those scenes — and this story — are not for the squeamish.
"The freaking pool's not draining like I had hoped," Dale Cillian laments. "He just broke down so bad."
Cillian is standing in an Ahwatukee backyard, just behind the block wall, past the faded Spanish-tile roof, at the edge of the pool. There are bits of decomposed human body clogging the pool pump, left after someone died in the water in the oppressive August heat and wasn't discovered for days.
At 60 and the owner of Biopro, LLC, Cillian has been in the "biohazard cleanup" industry for nearly half his life, but this is one of the worst cases he's seen.
Here's the thing about cleaning a pool after someone has died in it: It's not as easy as one would think, Cillian says. Depending on the size of it, you're going to want maybe 50 gallons of chlorine to knock down the bacteria levels, not to mention deodorizers and disinfectants to counter the odor. And oh, the odor. "It's disgusting," Cillian says. But more on that later.
Cillian stares at the pool. Something about chlorinated water causes the blood to suspend, like a cloud inside it, rather than mix in. He can tell by the way the cloud is shaped that the police used a pole, or something, to pull the body closer.
And then there's the fat. Nobody thinks about human beings being fat — but that's all we are! Cillian declares — and boy do you know it when you're trying to disinfect a pool. The human body melts as it decomposes, and for days the swimming pool's gentle waves have lapped thousands of those dime-sized yellow droplets to and fro, until sun-liquefied human fat has coated e-ver-y-thing: the plumbing, the pumps, the filters.
You can judge instantly the amateurs and the professionals by how they respond to cleaning fat.
"They think they're going to go throw bleach on stuff," Cillian cries out, indignant, before stating what is obvious, to him. "It's fat. It's oil. Just like any other oil you deal with, you have to use a degreaser."
At this point, Cillian is exasperated. Every inch of the pool will have to be disinfected, scrubbed, steam-cleaned and acid-washed. He'll have to drill out the pool pump and replace every plastic part. It's going to be a three-day job, at least.
He heads to his van to retrieve gloves, a mask and a white protective Tyvek suit. He has a job to start.
Dale Cillian, owner of Biohazard Cleanup Company uses chemicals to fog a Glendale residence believed to be contaminated with Methicillin-resistant Staphylococcus aureus, or MRSA, Wednesday, November 12th, 2014, in Glendale, Ariz. Cillian used a chemical that would also be used to clean areas contaminated with viruses such as Ebola.
(Photo: Jeffrey Lowman/ The Republic, Jeffrey Lowman/The Republic)
It was never supposed to be Dale Cillian's full-time job to clean up after dead bodies, after the homicides, suicides, car accidents and other morbid tragedies of the world. For one thing, the industry didn't exist when he was growing up in a tiny Ohio town.
In retrospect, the signs in his childhood were there. As a teenager, Cillian dated the daughter of the town's fire chief, who once entrusted him with retrieving graphic photos and reports on a local drowning victim. In high school, his science class took a field trip to the coroner's office; Cillian found it more intriguing than spooky.
In 1985, Cillian was fresh out of the fire academy and had started working as a Phoenix firefighter. One summer day, he returned to his apartment complex to a discover Mesa firefighters clustered around one of his neighbor's units. The guy had been dead for days, maybe even a week or two. It's a sight Cillian has never forgotten, both for how gruesome and ridiculous it was.
"Mesa's protocol at the time was, no matter what the condition of the body, they had to put a monitor on him and check him," Cillian says. "I still remember seeing that guy, and he was really bloated: purple, black, brown, green." Sure enough, firefighters had placed three small electrode pads upon the bloated body, just in case. Sure enough, he was dead.
After responders removed the neighbor's body, Cillian and his apartment manager called around asking if anyone specialized in this kind of cleanup. To his surprise, there was no one who did.
"We must have called every freaking funeral home in the state," he says. "A lot of them said, 'If you find somebody, let us know.' "
Cillian volunteered to clean up the man's apartment even though, he realized years later, he had no idea what he was doing. His fire training meant he was at least familiar with protective gear. Cillian went into the stench-filled unit with a firefighter's air pack rated for half an hour. Within 15 minutes, he was out of fresh air and had to switch to a regular mask.
The city of Mesa donated a dumpster but accidentally left it without a drain plug; anything wet they tossed into it seeped like molasses out the bottom. Then there was the matter of that terrible odor, which sickened for days afterward the maintenance man who was assisting him. It clung to the apartment, and Cillian was at his wit's end on how to banish it. At last, he called another company and discovered how they used an ozone machine to deodorize a site.
"That's how I learned to do it," Cillian says. He took note, then followed up with the same funeral homes he had called before. He had in fact found someone to do the job, he told them: Himself.
That year, he formed his own company, Specialized Services Inc. It would go through a handful of name changes to become Biopro. Cillian gathered cleanup jobs on the side through referrals from funeral homes and police officers. He tried to put an ad in the Yellow Pages, but was told there was no appropriate category for what he did. He was the first company of his kind in the Phoenix area.
"They just wouldn't do it," he says. "I guess it was a big deal to put a new listing in."
It would take years before he could get listed in the Yellow Pages, and the thrill of that small victory has not escaped him. He had never been so excited about a phone book coming out.
Those were the days.
Jeffrey Lowman/The Republic Dale Cillian, owner of Biohazard Cleanup Company uses chemicals to fog a Glendale residence believed to be contaminated with Methicillin-resistant Staphylococcus aureus, or MRSA, Wednesday, November 12th, 2014, in Glendale, Ariz. Cillian used a chemical that would also be used to clean areas contaminated with viruses such as Ebola.
(Photo: Jeffrey Lowman/ The Republic, Jeffrey Lowman/The Republic)
It didn't take long for Cillian to become the go-to man for crime scene cleanups in the Valley. He continued working full time as a Phoenix firefighter, putting in 24-hour shifts, then taking odd crime-scene cleaning jobs during his 48 hours off.
Five years later, a man climbed into a dumpster in Glendale, looking for cans. What he found instead was a blood-soaked carpet that had been "black-bagged" and tossed in with the regular garbage; he reported it to police, who recognized the carpet as the same one from a recent crime scene. That was how, in the midst of the country's AIDS scare, the city of Glendale became the first in the region to specially outsource its biohazard cleanups. Cillian got the contract.
Cillian's business was rapidly expanding. He hired a part-time assistant, then a full-time employee. He sought out others across the country who were in the same grisly line of work. He willingly gave interviews, posing for photos in his Tyvek suit and gas mask.
He obtained a contractor's license and became certified in a dozen specialties: Blood-borne pathogen work. Hazardous waste operations. How to handle asbestos, lead, anthrax.
Cillian also became fluent in the special lingo that comes with biohazard cleanup. "Decon" was short for decontaminate, the verb, not to be confused with a "decomp," referring to a job in which there was a decomposing body. If a job was "black bag only," then there was no medical or biohazardous waste involved. If you had to "red bag" a site, it means there was medical waste.
Dale Cillian, owner of Biohazard Cleanup Company uses chemicals to fog a Glendale residence believed to be contaminated with Methicillin-resistant Staphylococcus aureus, or MRSA, Wednesday, November 12th, 2014, in Glendale, Ariz. Cillian used a chemical that would also be used to clean areas contaminated with viruses such as Ebola.
(Photo: Jeffrey Lowman/ The Republic, Jeffrey Lowman/The Republic)
But more important, Cillian learned things that can only be known after years of experience. That brain matter was a lot more delicate — and a pain to clean up from asphalt — than he imagined. That it's better to wear sneakers to a cleanup because man-made materials can be easily disinfected; leather shoes cannot. That if someone dies by a load-bearing wall that can't be cut out, he can neutralize the blood. But if the body is decomposed, well, that's another story.
"There's no chemical that'll clean it," he says. "I gotta cut it out. It's not going to go away."
Some of the rules were befuddling. The Arizona Department of Environmental Quality has lengthy parameters for what qualifies as "biohazardous medical waste." Trash generated from a lab, doctor's office or hospital always has to be red-bagged, even if it's a pile of gauze pads collected over six months that have no blood on them.
Outside of those clinical settings, the key phrase is "free-flowing blood." If blood is flowing, it must go into a red bag. If blood has dried or coagulated, it's not medical waste.
"If I have a big puddle of blood, I could use kitty litter — which works really good — and then I could black-bag it because it's not flowing anymore," Cillian says.
And then there's the matter of transporting that waste to one of the three authorized medical-waste disposal facilities in the Valley. Just to apply for a medical-waste transportation permit with ADEQ costs $2,000, then $750 to renew it each year. Any vehicle used to transport medical waste must have an extra license from Maricopa County, which results in higher insurance premiums, too. Cillian has paid for it all.
"You'd better have the permit because you're a sorry excuse for a biohazard company if you can't even transport your own waste," he says.
Dale Cillian, owner of Biohazard Cleanup Company uses chemicals to fog a Glendale residence believed to be contaminated with Methicillin-resistant Staphylococcus aureus, or MRSA, Wednesday, November 12th, 2014, in Glendale, Ariz. Cillian used a chemical that would also be used to clean areas contaminated with viruses such as Ebola.
(Photo: Jeffrey Lowman/ The Republic, Jeffrey Lowman/The Republic)
Cillian apologizes for the mess upon entering Biopro headquarters, located in a nondescript office park in Gilbert. It's in a state of disarray because he's been half-heartedly packing, preparing to downsize and move. He just doesn't know where to or when.
On the floor are piles of papers, old framed newspaper articles and awards, each detailing a different achievement. There is a younger Dale Cillian, smiling through a gas mask for the camera as he talks about Biopro's foray into meth lab cleanup. There he is, in several clippings about his volunteer cleanup work in New Orleans after Hurricane Katrina struck. There is his plaque from the American Bio Recovery Association: "Dale Cillian, President / 2006 - 2010"
Attached to the office is a 3,000-square-foot warehouse, and when Cillian flicks on the lights, something like a miniature abandoned Home Depot appears. From floor to ceiling are shelves filled with supplies: red medical waste bags, black trash bags, canisters of chemicals, HEPA filters, carpet machines, hand sanitizers, aerosol sprays, row of metal fans, ladders of every length, dehumidifiers. In the very back are a cluster of brand-new vacuum cleaners; often he uses a vacuum only once.
"It's cheaper and faster to dump it than to spend the time cleaning it," Cillian says.
Some of these supplies he hasn't touched in years. Balanced on a pile of tools is an anthrax detection kit. In a small enclave are a washer and dryer he uses just for clothing he wears to scenes.
At a nearby lot, he has parked a small fleet of Biopro-branded vehicles: a 16-foot van, an 18-foot van, two Ford F-550 trucks. It pales in comparison to what he used to have: a light trailer that could illuminate a stretch of highway, two additional trucks. He has kept a flatbed truck with its own water hoses, pumps and traffic cones.
The conference room seems frozen in the mid-'90s. On the bookshelves are endless training videos in VHS format, books and binders with titles like "Fun With Chemistry" and "Restorative Drying." Bankers boxes hold rows of photographs from nearly every job he's cleaned, each envelope containing 4" x 6" prints — doubles. Cillian stopped counting how many jobs he and his company had handled when he reached 25,000 a few years ago.
"Scenes never look different," he says. "Just the structures."
Nevertheless, he fishes out a photo from one of the few scenes that has stood out from the hundreds of others: a homicide, in which a trail of blood led to a bloody handprint on the phone.
He has never been able to forget it.
Jeffrey Lowman/The Republic Dale Cillian uses chemicals to fog a Glendale residence believed to be contaminated with Methicillin-resistant Staphylococcus aureus, or MRSA, during a cleaning earlier this month. Dale Cillian, owner of Biohazard Cleanup Company uses chemicals to fog a Glendale residence believed to be contaminated with Methicillin-resistant Staphylococcus aureus, or MRSA, Wednesday, November 12th, 2014, in Glendale, Ariz. Cillian used a chemical that would also be used to clean areas contaminated with viruses such as Ebola.
(Photo: Jeffrey Lowman/ The Republic, Jeffrey Lowman/The Republic)
There are still times the job trips him up.
Upon initial inspection, the house didn't seem like it was in too bad of shape. The man had died away from the walls, on the first floor. Cillian pulled up part of the carpet and gave the concrete a cursory scan. Nothing that couldn't be acid-washed, he thought. He noted one or two flies, at most, and quoted the homeowner $3,000 for the job.
What he hadn't seen were the cracks in the concrete. Underfoot, decomposed body fluids were seeping through the fissures, insignificant to the average homeowner, but a bona fide disaster for biohazard cleanup.
"It really went into the concrete and it really spread in those cracks," Cillian says.
That the man had died on the home's first floor now was a detriment; if he had passed away upstairs, at least Cillian could have pulled out the floor and replaced it. The ensuing job would require him to jackhammer a huge section of the concrete, lest the fluids continue through the cracks and contaminate the walls.
When he started the job, Cillian pulled up the rest of the carpet. By then, there were "tens of thousands" of maggots underneath.
"It was a friggin' nightmare," Cillian remembers. "(The price) should have been double."
No longer could he simply acid-wash the surface of the concrete. He would need to degrease it, too, after blasting as much of the slab away as possible.
"Cleaning it and getting rid of all the contamination are two different things," Cillian says. "Once you decompose, it's a whole different ballgame. It's one thing to be fresh, but it's a pain when it starts the other way."
Cillian is almost obsessively meticulous in his cleanup jobs, in part because it's required, but also because it's "just Dale," says his wife. Rhonda Cillian has watched her husband throw everything into growing Biopro.
"He's a Type-A personality," Rhonda says. "He wants to be good at what he does. For years and years, he was the authority."
They met about 25 years ago at Studebakers, then a popular Valley hangout for Phoenix firefighters. Even then, Dale had a cell phone, a clunky, brick-like Motorola. "What the heck is that and why would you need one?" Rhonda remembers asking. Dale carried a pager, too.
After a few dates, he told her he cleaned up crime scenes on the side. She wasn't fazed — even when Dale got a call in the middle of a date and she had to tag along with him to a job, a grisly murder at an Asian market in central Phoenix.
Dale Cillian, owner of Biohazard Cleanup Company uses chemicals to fog a Glendale residence believed to be contaminated with Methicillin-resistant Staphylococcus aureus, or MRSA, Wednesday, November 12th, 2014, in Glendale, Ariz. Cillian used a chemical that would also be used to clean areas contaminated with viruses such as Ebola.
(Photo: Jeffrey Lowman/ The Republic, Jeffrey Lowman/The Republic)
After they married in 1992, Rhonda continued being involved in the business. She would accompany him to sites sometimes, consoling families. They used to pick people up from Sky Harbor airport, relatives of the deceased who would arrive in a strange city confused and grief-stricken. When their son was born, she stopped going to crime scenes. Now she handles the business side of Biopro.
On a recent morning, the Cillians' sprawling, immaculate home smells of freshly baked banana bread. The bananas had been spoiling, explains Rhonda, and she didn't want them to go to waste. Unlike at Dale's warehouse, here there is no sign anyone in the household is involved in biohazard cleanup.
"There's two rules: I don't want to talk about it at dinner," she says. "And I don't want to talk about it in front of our son."
Other than that, she's grown used to hearing Dale's then-pager, now cell phone, buzz in the middle of the night on his side of the bed. They're certainly not the typical 8-to-5 family, she confesses, but it hardly matters. "After you have a child, you never sleep the way you sleep."
Dale retired from the Phoenix Fire Department seven years ago, and now Biopro is his full-time baby. His cooler is always ready to go. His clothes are always laid out. He keeps his shoes in one section of the garage.
Yet, Rhonda is keenly aware that increasing competition has put a squeeze on Biopro's approach. While Dale's warehouse and fleet of vehicles sit waiting for the next job, stuffed with every imaginable tool that could be used for any possible scenario, other companies operate with lower overhead: out of a van, for example. Or they are national companies who outsource to several different Arizona contractors, often the lowest bidder.
"You can't compete with someone who's going to come in at $35 an hour," Rhonda says. "I look at it this way. If you needed your teeth cleaned, would you go to a gynecologist? They're both doctors. But this is what we specialize in. We do biohazard cleaning and it's different."
Is it possible for a mom-and-pop crime scene cleanup shop to have a future in this business?
"I think there is," she says, "but it's just getting to be a smaller piece of the pie."
Dale Cillian, owner of Biohazard Cleanup Company uses chemicals to fog a Glendale residence believed to be contaminated with Methicillin-resistant Staphylococcus aureus, or MRSA, Wednesday, November 12th, 2014, in Glendale, Ariz. Cillian used a chemical that would also be used to clean areas contaminated with viruses such as Ebola.
(Photo: Jeffrey Lowman/ The Republic, Jeffrey Lowman/The Republic)
In August, in a small conference room in Tempe, representatives from four of the Valley's biohazard cleanup companies sat awkwardly around a table with city staff members. They were there to ask questions before bidding on Tempe's biohazard cleanup contract, which Cillian has held for years.
There is Frances Vierkoetter, owner of Clean Scene AZ, who spent 12 years auditing chemical disposal sites and making sure chemicals were disposed of safely, before transitioning to biohazard. To her, it was all the same.
"It was not a difficult transition. You just deal with different hazards," she says later. "They all have requirements. They all need permits."
Her compact south Phoenix office is full of fastidiously tabbed binders, with cream-colored walls, faux mahogany office furniture and a framed motivational print ("GOALS") that shows an eagle flying into a sunrise.
Most of her business comes from disinfecting medical boards, similar to stretchers, used in ambulances and hospitals. Behind her office, two employees run piles of orange plastic backboards through a commercial dishwasher-like machine. She has and Cillian have an uneasy relationship, but she dismisses any notion that what she does is not biohazard cleanup.
"In Dale's mind, no one knows what they're doing except him," she says. "I just stay out of it because I don't have time for that."
There was also Sharan Godwin, owner of Crime Clean Decontamination, LLC, who has run her business out of her home and van for more than 20 years. Like Vierkoetter, she has a distant relationship with her peers in the industry. Like Vierkoetter, she has clashed with Cillian in the past.
"I have no contact with my competitors," Godwin says later. "I have no intention of getting into their problems. I just kind of do my own thing."
These days, few cities' biohazard contracts include cleanup of private homes, which now falls to insurance companies to cover. Instead, about half of municipal calls are for cleaning up roads after traffic accidents and hit-and-runs. The other half is usually cleaning up police cars and jail holding cells after people have vomited or defecated in them, often for fun. It would be fair to call it the least glamorous side of biohazard cleanup. But even those contracts now are difficult to snag.
In the '90s, Cillian had only a handful of competitors. By now, by his estimates, there are hundreds. Restoration companies, carpet-cleaning companies, janitorial services, hazardous material companies — all have gotten into the biohazard cleanup business in some way or another over the last three decades.
"There's a lot of people who think they're going to get rich on this quick," says Andrew Yurchuck, president of the American Bio Recovery Association and owner of a biohazard cleanup company in New Jersey. "That's far from true. They think it's glamorous. Everybody's seen CSI, OK. It's actually terrible work. It's dangerous."
There's the post-traumatic stress disorder, which he says is no different from what soldiers, police officers and emergency medical service personnel get. One time Cillian accidentally was stuck with a needle that had been placed in a red bag without a cover. Every quarter, he gets checked for AIDS, hepatitis, syphilis, everything.
"This is an explosive growth industry and quite honestly most of the rest of the contractors out there really aren't qualified to do this type of cleanup," Yurchuck says. "There's not a whole lot of oversight.... You would be amazed at how many companies are not registered in the states they operate in."
Cillian charged $175 an hour when he started 29 years ago, "which I thought was fair." He's raised his prices $25 to $50 an hour since then, depending on the contract. But gas prices have doubled. His insurance prices have tripled.
"It's not even close," he says. "Everything's gone up so I'm barely making $10 to $15 an hour per job... It's not like you do this five times a week, every week."
Twice a week, he travels around the Valley and picks up medical waste from several companies. ("Home-generated medical sharps," such as needles used by people with diabetes, are exempt from this.) If he didn't get these odd jobs, he'd be out of business, he says.
Several weeks later, Cillian calls, absolutely beside himself about the Tempe contract. The city awarded it to Godwin, whose bid was the lowest at $60 per job. He had bid lower than his usual rate: $160 per hour.
"Would you get up at 3 o'clock in the morning to do this? For $60?" he says, irate. "You couldn't get Molly Maid to go out and do anything for $60. You really think this can be done?"
He's on a roll. He rattles off names of friends in the business in Australia, South Africa, Brazil.
"They're not like this anywhere in the United States. We're the laughingstock of the country. We're the laughingstock of the world! And we are!" he says. "We're a joke for what we charge here. It's only Phoenix."
Dale Cillian, owner of Biohazard Cleanup Company uses chemicals to fog a Glendale residence believed to be contaminated with Methicillin-resistant Staphylococcus aureus, or MRSA, Wednesday, November 12th, 2014, in Glendale, Ariz. Cillian used a chemical that would also be used to clean areas contaminated with viruses such as Ebola.
(Photo: Jeffrey Lowman/ The Republic, Jeffrey Lowman/The Republic)
Cillian has a lot on his mind the week he goes to clean the mobile home, a low-slung stilted structure in a quiet subdivision on the border of Mesa and Scottsdale.
One of his Ford F-550 truck needs new tires, which is going to set him back several hundred dollars. His sole employee quit several weeks ago, and since then Cillian has been fielding all calls and jobs on his own. He is exhausted. His back aches. "You just slow down as you get older," he says.
He's still trying to hire somebody, something he's grown used to in an industry with a predictably high turnover rate. But the responses he's received to his Craigslist ad have been less than promising, even after he moved his post from under the 'Skilled Trade/Craft' category to 'General Labor.'
"There was one guy who wanted $100 an hour," he says, balking. Those are the people who have watched one too many episodes of CSI, who think this is a get-rich-quick industry.
It's the flies that snap Cillian out of his thoughts and back to the present. When he steps into the trailer, he sets off a tornado of flies — hundreds, if not thousands, of them have blanketed the walls, almost blending in with the faux wood paneling in the bedroom and the yellow wallpaper in the bathroom. Cillian unleashes a torrent of profanity.
He doesn't know which is worse in this case, the flies or the pervasive odor of a rotting corpse. How would he describe the odor? Three decades later, he can't quite find the right words for how horrible it is. "It's sweet," he says after a long pause. "And repulsive." If you can't conjure up how it smells, then you've never smelled it before. And if you've ever smelled it before, then you have never forgotten.
The mobile home's owner had told Cillian it would cost $6,500 to demolish the trailer. He told her it could be salvaged for less.
Cillian brings his boxy metal ozone machine into the living room. He has got to do something about this odor. He places the machine on an already-open ironing board, next to a half-crisp shirt still draped over the board's edge. It begins buzzing, sounding like an approaching swarm of wasps.
He hauls the mattress out first, then the bedframe, the piles of laundry that had been next to the dead body. He rips up the carpet, the underpad, each layer revealing what is still a startling large amount of decomposing body fluid that has seeped through. Finally, he is down to the floor boards, ready to saw out the portions stained by decomposing body fluids. He's the one-man star of his own, macabre home-makeover show.
Inside the suit, Cillian is marinating in his own sweat, exacerbating the stale heat inside the trailer home. The mask weighs on his face, and he pauses every 10 minutes to take a break. Each time, he yanks a paper towel off a roll to swipe at his face.
"I can only go so long in this," he says with a deep sigh. "I've gotta stop. I'm dying."
After several hours, a neighbor emerges from her neatly kept screened-in porch next door and casts Dale a sympathetic look.
"I'm sorry you have to be out in this. You need water?" she asks, before shaking her head and talking about how foul the stench had been for a week. "Honey, they're not going to be able to get this stink out."
Cillian seems to perk up at this suggestion. He assures her that he, if anybody, can.
"I created this whole thing," Cillian says shortly afterward, at the suggestion that he retire. Retire? From the industry he practically invented? he asks. He shakes his head. He's too invested. He is never going to retire, he insists.
He dons his mask again and creaks back up the wooden steps into the fly-filled room. He has a job to finish.
Biopro LLC owner Dale Cillian works on decontaminating the inside of a Scottsdale mobile home this summer after a body was discovered there. Dale Cillian cleans the inside of a mobile home this summer where a body was discovered.
(Photo: Amy B Wang/The Republic)
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