Meth Cleaning: A Comprehensive Guide to Cleaning a Meth Contaminated House

A meth-contaminated house is not an easy problem to solve. The meth cleaning process is involved, thorough, and specific. Done wrong or without the proper equipment, it is also dangerous.

Today we will discuss that cleaning process and hopefully manage to emphasize why it is not something anyone but a professional hazard cleaning service can generally manage.

Meth Labs Are Unregulated

First, let's begin with the obvious. Meth labs are not legal anywhere in the United States. By extension, this means any location containing such a lab will lack all but basic safety precautions (if that).

Moreover, meth chemists can make the drug with what, to an outsider, may seem like a random assortment of chemicals. There be 100 or more chemicals at a meth cleanup site, some of which can be very dangerous if they interact with each other or cleaning chemicals you introduce to the site.

Without getting too specific, meth can be made with volatile organic chemicals (VOCs), acids, bases, metals, and chemical salts. Almost every element on that list is going to be toxic to some degree to the human body.

VOCs, for instance, can cause nose and throat irritation, dizziness, confusion, breathing difficulties, and more. Some VOCs are even linked to cancer.

Dangerous and Difficult to Predict

In addition to the above, the process of making methamphetamine lab clean up is also going to mean dealing with meth byproducts. The process of making meth does not only make meth. There is also a chemical slurry leftover as well.

It's said one pound of methamphetamine can make as much as six pounds of toxic waste. These chemical cocktails might be caustic, affect your breathing, or do any number of other things to the body. The toxic runoff of the meth-making process also can be almost anywhere.

Because meth labs are illegal operations, criminals dump the waste into water supplies, the ground, or just leave it on the property. You cannot trust much about a meth-contaminated house before it is thoroughly inspected and cleaned.

This is all in addition, of course, to the risk you are exposed to meth itself. Meth is very hard on the body and can lead to psychosis and, in some cases, deadly strokes.

It's also possible people injected meth at the location too. If they did, there is the risk of exposure to dirty needles. This can open up a person to risking all manner of blood-borne infections, including HIV and AIDS.

Smelly and Pervasive

It may pale in comparison to some of the other issues we've discussed, but the fumes of the meth-making process can smell very bad. Part of methamphetamine cleaning will be trying to get this pervasive smell out of the location.

Meth labs are often described as smelling like cat urine, ammonia, or rotten eggs. While this smell may somewhat lessen once the operation is shut down, it is not going away without a thorough cleaning.

This smell can be so pervasive that much of the room where meth was made will have to be torn apart. Chemical fumes can stain and even dissolve other materials; salvaging is not always possible and even more often not worth the cost and effort.

It should be noted that this smell signals something more dangerous. Meth-contaminated locations smell because chemical particles are absorbed into upholstery, carpets, curtains, and even more things solids like walls. Disturbing these things may shake the particles into the air, exposing you to them.

This is why people cleaning meth-contaminated locales wear special gear, including breathing masks. These masks help to protect their bodies from exposure to dangerous chemicals. Getting these chemicals, even trace amounts, in the eyes or lungs can do real harm.

Meth Cleaning Can Be an Explosion Risk

Most people are somewhat aware that meth labs are explosion risks. However, shutting down a lab does not negate that risk.

Until one cleans a location, it is something of a time bomb. Dirty beakers, toxic waste, chemicals, and more will wallow throughout the location. If the wrong piece of the ceiling collapses, or even a tiny amount of chemical waste flows the wrong way, it could cause a dangerous chemical reaction.

This is not to mention any risk of even a tiny spark, be it from a fire or electrical problem. These might ignite some chemicals at the site.

In turn, this could cause a cascade of ignition as many chemicals ignite at once. In the worst cases, as we noted, a large explosion is possible.

Perhaps this more than any other problem is why a professional cleaning team should clean up a methamphetamine site. Not only does the team have the gear to thoroughly clean up chemical waste without serious risk to themselves, but they also have the awareness to avoid issues with sparking or fires.

Call HCI Environmental & Engineering Service

At HCI Environmental & Engineering Service, we've made it our job to help people deal with hazardous waste cleanup of all kinds. Meth cleaning is one of the many services we offer to our clients, with our experts able to safely and thoroughly clean up a location so it can again be used without concern overexposure to toxic waste.

If you'd like to learn more about what we can do for you, contact us. Our customer representative will work hard to get you the services you need to again make a location safe for us.