Laura Spaulding, 46, opened Spaulding Decon in 2005 to clean up the nastiest messes, such as those left by decomposing bodies, bloody homicides and hoarders. She started franchising four years ago, and now there are 37 Spaulding Decon locations around the continental United States. Though the company has always done environmental disinfection work, the coronavirus pandemic has greatly increased the demand, she said. She talked with the Tampa Bay Times about the business.
How did you decide to get into this business?
It was back in 2005. I was working in law enforcement. I spent seven years working undercover narcotics and vice and patrol, and I really got disenchanted with the low pay, the lack of advancement. So I started looking for a business that I could operate. This almost kind of fell in my lap when a victim’s family of a homicide asked me when we were going to come back and clean it up – as a law enforcement officer. And I thought, wow, that’s a really strange question but I have no idea what the answer is. So I started looking into it, and I realized these people are really on their own. Like there’s no one to clean it up for them. And I thought that’s horrible to have to do that...
There was a company in Texas at the time that was doing quite well, and I paid him to train me how to do the cleanups. So that’s where I got the information, but there were less than probably 20 companies in the entire United States that were doing it at the time.
It would seem that not a lot of people would want to do this kind of work.
We actually don’t have any trouble getting staff, and I know that surprises a lot of people. We rarely even have to put out an ad for cleanup techs because we’re inundated with resumes... We created a ton of interest from social media because we’re showing and educating the public. So we get people like firemen, or students, nurses, people that work in the funeral home industry. They’re all really exposed to this stuff already and it tends not to bother them at all. But again, we don’t see the body. The body has already been removed and we’re just cleaning up the aftermath.
You say one has to be physically fit because breathing though the respirator mask is “like breathing through a straw.’' So the work can be tiring?
Oh, extremely. You’re doing quite a bit of construction work. Like today we’re in St. Petersburg and we’re jacking up floor tile. We’re removing drywall because the person was there for several weeks and their body fluids wicked up the wall…We can completely remove the odor by removing everything that the body fluids have touched.
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How do you train your technicians?
We do kind of a classroom style and then we have a hands-on facility in our warehouse. We use pigs’ blood and we recreate a scene and have them handle it, clean it up. It’s pretty cool. They tend to love that part because they can ask questions, and the customer is not there … We make it look extremely realistic – how to handle mattresses, what do you do if the coils have blood on them or body fluids. We put (in) a bunch of different scenes. We have three different rooms.
What are the worst hoarders that you deal with?
In my opinion the worst ones are animal hoarders and what we call syllogomania, which is the hoarding of just pure trash. Those are the worst because of the rats, the intense amount of roaches and spiders and everything to go along with it …They’re everywhere, absolutely everywhere. It’s to the point that they are so all over the place that we’re just kind of used to them. We’re just like picking them up with a shovel and throwing them out.
It’s amazing, people think these houses are in lower middle class (areas). We’ve done million-dollar homes, we’ve done $20,000 mobile homes. It affects everybody across economic levels. You know what surprised me the most was that hoarders are of above-average intelligence. We’ve done psychologists, lawyers, pharmacists, social workers, teachers. They’re all professional people. These aren’t just your random mental health case wandering the streets.
What are the major threats on that kind of job?
In (scenes) like that, our biggest threat is hantavirus from the rats. That’s an airborne thing. We’re constantly reminding employees, even if it looks mundane, don’t take off your respirator because the rodent feces can kill you. So we’re wearing a respirator for that stuff. But sharps are a big one, (and) fire hazard … They tend to overload all of their electrical outlets because very few work and they can’t call for service.
What do the experts say causes hoarding?
It’s an extreme tragic loss of some kind. It could be loss of a child. It could be loss of a parent. Something triggers them to start hoarding. And those items, whether they look like trash or useless to us, are replacing what they lost. It makes them feel comfort despite the living situation. They become extremely reclusive, extremely depressed, and they want their outside to match what they feel on the inside.
You seem to really like this work.
Yes, I love it. Every day is different. I really get to help people. As opposed to when I was in law enforcement, (when) no one was happy to see me, now everyone’s happy to see me. So it’s a nice contrast.
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