A person gets depressed beyond belief and blows his brains out. The police arrive and begin to survey the scene. They give the surviving spouse a card for a local clean up service whom she calls immediately. Hire a professional company, this is not a job for family and friends. They arrive several hours later and begin to work. They work 18 hours over two days on the clean-up.
The body is removed by the ambulance company and taken to the hospital for an autopsy which is likely required by law.
When a person dies, all of the fluids exit the body immediately. This means that urine and feces exit the body all over the trauma site within a few minutes. So there is a mass of fluids that have to be cleaned up including urine, feces and all of the blood that was lost during the shooting.
The trauma clean-up crew sets about to removing everything that could have come in contact with any of the fluids. The fluids are considered to be "bio-hazards" because if anyone comes in contact with them they may be contaminated with poisons of some kind. It is not like cleaning up after a baby when the loss of fluids happens to an adult.
The crew throws away all of the belongings in the room that have anything on them or might be suspected of having anything on them. The items have to be bagged and made ready for the trash.
Then the crew begins to remove the flooring from the floors including carpeting or tile or vinyl all the way down to and including the sub-flooring. Shades, blinds or draperies have to be removed from the windows and bagged. Then the crew begins to remove the drywall from the walls and ceilings and bags it all as well for removal as trash.
Because contamination by "bio-hazards" such as blood, urine and feces could possibly kill someone else, all of the removed materials have to be treated as if they will in fact kill someone else. Anything of a porous nature has to be removed and bagged and taken to the dump and then to the bio-hazard section of the dump.
After everything is removed, remaining surfaces are treated with a disinfectant spray or cleaner in order to prepare the surfaces to be carpeted, re-drywalled, repainted, and used again.
After the trauma crew has done their job, basically gutting the space, the homeowner will have to hire out workers to do the work remaining to be done.
The cost for the trauma clean-up crew to come and do their job should be covered by your home owner's insurance policy because it is quite costly and does do a great deal of damage to the property. Expect the cost to be, at a minimum, around $13,000 for 18 hours. It runs about $600.00 an hour.
Because of the extreme sensitivity of this type of clean-up, it is not advised that the homeowners embark on this job themselves. It should be covered under the homeowner insurance policy as it is very extensive and very costly.
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