Offering service to aid people in some of life’s most difficult moments

By DAN KEGLEY/Staff

Funeral directors understand the quandary facing new business owners Kenny Lyles and son-in-law Wes Price of Chilhowie, but even undertakers have an easier time of marketing their services. After all, everyone will need their help sometime. Death is, of course, inevitable and solicitation of end-of-life accommodations is almost equally so.

It’s the means of death or serious injury that creates both the need for Lyles and Price’s service and their difficulty in offering it. As Lyles said this week, they’re in a Catch 22, stuck between a rock and a hard place.
At considerable investment of time and personal expense, they have become trained and certified to offer a humanitarian service few people will ever need and none want to think about until they need it.

This fall, they started Mountain Empire Bio-Recovery Inc. They are technicians trained in cleaning up what can be a considerable amount of human bodily fluid, bone and tissue and residual contamination where murders, suicides, unattended deaths, and even non-fatal but bloody injuries and accidents happen.

For family members faced with these situations, especially fatalities, cleaning up after them can add levels of abhorrent trauma on top of the loss itself.
Sometimes good can come from tragedy, and the community has sought long and hard for any good to be found in a violent murder of a family in Seven Mile Ford three years ago. Lyles and Price got the inspiration for their service after a man shot to death a couple and their young child in 2005.

“After the scene was released by the investigators it was left for the family and there was no one to clean it up,” Price said in a recent e-mail. “We vowed then that no family should be left with the horrifying task of cleaning up a scene like that and have devoted our time to become trained in the bio-recovery field.”
Price said he and Lyles researched and found a school teaching bio-recovery in South Carolina and learned there how complex a task it can be.

“We thought we’d take a bucket of water and some bleach and that would be it,” Price said.

Not even close. Organic matter soon deactivates bleach, Lyles said, rendering a mop bucket full of water impotent to disinfect and creating instead a new means of spreading contamination.

And there can be plenty of that. Many disease organisms can survive in suspended animation outside the body for long periods, awaiting reintroduction into a new host. Price said while the floor can look clean, it can harbor viruses that can transfer to children’s toys, for example, and then to children who put the toys in their mouths. More directly, small children often put their mouths directly on floors.

Lyles and Price got a real education in infectious disease management and decontamination technology to go with their certification by the National Institute of Decontamination Specialists and the American Bio-recovery Association. They gained OSHA (Occupational Safety and Health Administration) compliance in standards for handling bloodborne pathogens, hazard communications, respiratory protection, industrial site lockout/tagout procedure, and confined space operations.
Those last two items enable them to respond to work sites where bad things happen to people using machines.

OSHA is serious about making sure people know how to handle bloodborne pathogens, imposing fines as high as $70,000 for violations of standards of the OSHA regulation whose number Price can recite without effort: “29CFR1910:1030.”
“We learned a lot,” Lyles said.

What they learned, they said, made obvious that carpet cleaning services probably are not addressing the full scope of contamination when they respond to accident and death scenes.

“A thumbnail-size spot of blood will contaminate a two-foot wide area under the carpet,” Price said, necessitating carpet removal and direct cleaning of the surface below.

He and Lyles can handle that as well as a much more involved scenario that is tough to merely read about, the contamination potential of body that goes undiscovered. “Fluids from an unattended death in two weeks can seep through the floor to the ground,” Price said.

Among its many steps, decontamination involves ensuring the environment at clean-up is identical to its state when the trauma occurred. For example, Price said, the temperature need to be the same. If it is colder, pores in surfaces close, trapping molecules of substances that can later emit odors. Even the ozone machine they employ can’t reach into closed pores, he said.
Police are highly protective of crime scenes until investigators can glean from the physical evidence all they need. After that, the scene is released to the family, or to the business if the event happens in the workplace. In that instance, too many managers have employees just mop up, a practice that is unlikely to disinfect the scene.

Families should not have to deal with that aspect of a death, Lyles and Price believe.

“People have to go on with making funeral arrangements,” Price said. “They can turn [cleanup] over to us. We can get in as soon as it is released.”
Their training involved hand-on exercises. One scenario presented a suicide by shotgun, another a stabbing. Hog blood and organs were reasonable facsimiles for their human counterparts in what instructors told them was a pretty realistic presentation of what the students would encounter in practice.
Lyles and Price incorporated their business Aug. 1 and are awaiting their first call to service, and that’s how they view it. Despite a collective investment of some $14,000 in education and equipment, they’ll operate much as rescue squads do. Mountain Empire Bio-Recovery will bill homeowners’ insurance they say covers their work.

“Ninety-nine percent of the time it is not coming out of the homeowner’s pocket,” Price said. They’ll even handle the billing.

However, payment is not a consideration, they said. They’ll work for the uninsured and those unable to pay just the same as for the insured.
Lyles and Price’s marketing quandary involves their desire to remain tactful in promoting a service for needs that remain largely unthinkable. No one expects to face cleanup after violence or accidents.

“We understand that our business is one that is not the type that you can make flyers and use for advertising, but there is a need for these services and families are not aware that they are available,” Price said.

The men are directly contacting law enforcement agencies in Southwest Virginia and Northeast Tennessee, and plan to make connections with rescue squads and other first responders.