Meth Chemicals Exposure Often Hidden

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http://www.denverpost.com/Stories/0,1002,11711%257E465971,00.html

Firms specialize in cleaning up meth lab chemicals

By Simpson

Denver Post Staff Writer

Sunday, March 17, 2002 - At a motel tucked beneath the dull whine of

the Boulder Turnpike, the man in Room 302 smells something funny.

When police show up on an unrelated disturbance, the guest

approaches a deputy and tells him about Room 303's pervasive smell,

which by now is making him feel sick. Minutes later, after knocking on

the door, peeking in a window and seeing a familiar array of glassware,

tubes and chemicals that point to one thing - a meth lab - deputies

arrest a 39-year-old man who's out on bond after the explosion of a

suspected meth lab last fall in Brighton.

By midafternoon the next day, the gas-masked and rubber-suited

hazmat team has removed chemicals and containers and dusted for

fingerprints. The building inspector slaps a red-and-white sign on the

door, flagging the room as unsafe, and orders it cleaned up - an

expense that falls to the motel's proprietor, who sits outside his office

with a pained expression.

He's been stung by meth's environmental cost.

" It's like getting robbed, " said the proprietor, declining to give his name.

" It's going to come out of my pocket. He probably wouldn't have gotten

as much if he'd just held me up. "

Neal er rips the cheesy art off motel walls, dismantles and

destroys the furniture, tears carpet and pad from the floor and slices it

into strips. He trashes televisions, wrecks microwaves, yanks down

shower curtains.

Business is good.

" Colorado is definitely hot, " said er, whose Crime Scene Cleaners

Inc. removes the toxic residue of busted methamphetamine labs for

hotel and motel chains across the country. " In the last year or two,

meth has just exploded. "

But Colorado, like most states, imposes no environmental standards to

ensure safe cleanup of known meth lab sites, where chemical residue

can cause severe health concerns long after cops have cuffed the

culprits and carted off the evidence.

Contamination from labs set up in apartments, houses or motel rooms -

and police stress that the labs appear in high-end and low-end

establishments - can leave behind problems for new residents that most

federal, state and local laws don't address.

" We've gone into rooms that have orange walls from iodine stains, blue

carpets now black from red phosphorous, " er said. " And that stuff

stays airborne and can corrupt you like lead poisoning. It's incredible

stuff. It's nasty. "

Consider some staples of the meth recipe:

Muriatic acid, commonly used to clean swimming pools, can burn skin

on contact, and its vapors can burn eyes and nasal passages. Sodium

hydroxide, better known as lye, can cause contact burns, particularly

after it has been dissolved in water. Solvents like toluene, often used as

a paint stripper, can cause dizziness and nausea.

And that doesn't even count the unknown, long-range health effects from

exposure to the dozens of chemicals used to " cook " the highly addictive

drug.

" What has occurred in the last five years is rapid growth of labs that are

mobile, small volume, set up more often in residential settings, " said

Fred Dowsett, compliance coordinator with the Colorado Department of

Public Health and Environment. " So there are many more of them in

situations where they affect many more people. "

The Occupational Safety and Health Administration has exposure

standards for some of the solvents used to make meth. But those are

based on the workplace, not a residence where exposure could occur

over long periods of time.

One problem with creating safe standards for meth-making chemicals is

that many of them are common, over-the-counter products - not your

typical Superfund site pollutants, according to experts from the

Environmental Protection Agency. Also, different methods for producing

the drug create different types and levels of contamination.

Although Washington and Oregon have established limits on acceptable

trace amounts of chemicals used to make meth, experts point out that

even these, while considered stringent, have no scientific basis.

er said his $8 million-a-year, San Francisco-based business deals

almost exclusively with hotel and motel chains, whose liability concerns

keep them on top of the potential chemical dangers. He employs the

Washington and Oregon standards no matter where he's cleaning up a

meth mess.

And that usually means tearing out, destroying and disposing of virtually

any porous material - including appliances - before triple-washing

everything, vacuuming and filtering the cleaning agent, and sealing every

flat surface in the room.

RMCAT Environmental, another private company that does cleanup

work at meth lab sites, usually does " visible trace " cleanup in Colorado.

But it won't declare a site habitable unless the owner asks it to be

cleaned to numeric standards, in which case the Oregon standards are

used.

But most won't pay for the extra cleanup, said RMCAT president Matt

Wetzel.

" It comes down to economics and what's forced in terms of an action, "

Wetzel said. " It's the property owner's call. "

Ron West and his Environmental Property Investigators do

environmental audits in Colorado, Oklahoma and Texas as part of " due

diligence " required by lenders in commercial real estate transactions.

Some of the properties they've inspected were found to have chemical

residue from meth labs that had been busted and then nominally

cleaned by the DEA.

Deals fell apart as one troubling question lingered: How clean is it?

" There are real estate brokers who have decided to walk, " West said.

" Either they didn't want to pay for the assessment or take the risk

associated with the property. "

There's no such safeguard on residential real estate transactions in

Colorado, West said. But he points out that Nevada records any meth

bust on the property deed. To have that red flag removed, the owner

must prove the problem has been cleaned up.

Some health departments in the Denver area have issued letters in the

wake of meth lab busts advising property owners of the hazards that

may remain. But those letters carry no legal weight.

er, who ranks Colorado among his top five states for meth lab

cleanup, said regulation is inevitable, once lawmakers figure out who will

foot the bill. Some law enforcement agencies, such as the DEA, pay for

meth lab containment, but cleanup of the residual chemicals usually

falls to the property owner.

er said he charges his Colorado motel clients about $1,500 per

room, owing to the state's lack of regulatory tests and red tape. That

figure jumps to about $12,000 in the few regulated states that demand

extensive chemical testing.

Colorado already is watching cleanups more closely, even though

officials have little legal clout, er said. He notes that on his last

two jobs for a Colorado motel chain, he was asked to provide - as a

courtesy, not a requirement - a " post-remediation report. "

" That tells me regulation is coming, " he said.

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Carl E.Grimes

Healthy Habitats (sm)

grimes@...

303-671-9653

303-751-0416 fax

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