18 May Ep. 67 Biohazard Cleanup with Sam Baer of Servpro

TRANSCRIPTION

We are live cool well welcome everybody to the st louis realtor podcast uh i’m your host adam Kruse here with my co-host shannon st pierre hello thanks to covid we’re still doing these from our homes um we are super excited today because we have sam here from servpro and sam today you know what we want to talk about is all about biohazard cleanup and interesting and any other interesting things i guess that servpro does but um just to give a quick intro a few months ago one of our realtors she used um servpro for a buyer has a biohazard cleanup and she was kind of telling us about it and we thought it was really interesting and so we thought you know this is my first time and however many 15 years or whatever having to deal with something like that uh you know someone was deceased in the property and um which is a good thing it’s a good thing what’s a good thing that i haven’t had to deal with deal with it up to this point after this but it’s a good thing that i haven’t had to deal with it right yeah thing that we haven’t had to deal with it but we didn’t you know we didn’t really know what to do and and hopefully it doesn’t happen to many people but what are you supposed to do and actually right after that um we had another instance where a tenant died in one of our properties that we manage and so there was no biohazard cleanup in that situation but we know sam we wanted to have you on to kind of learn about all this stuff and interview you and talk about it and shannon is super interested in this because she said her favorite tv channel is id id channel uh so sam do you like watch that stuff and go oh my gosh like do i because it’s what you do i like to watch it just because i’m one of those strange people that for some for some reason if i’m watching tv i have to watch something that i feel like i’m gonna get something out of so a lot of times i’ll actually watch orders or shows like that just because the things that i’ve run into in real life and it sounds funny but those people are actually professionals on tv and they actually do have good advice about things and when you’re going into situations like this it’s you can take a thousand classes you can read a thousand books but the guys that are out there doing it every day and the guys are actually cleaning things and dealing with the smell while they’re trying to think and and figure out how to do things and all the different components coming at you at once those are the people that i like to see at work so you find them on id you find them on strange tv shows that people don’t like to watch that is interesting i just watched a show hoarders this past weekend or something and i haven’t watched that show in so long and i actually did learn a few things from it in terms of um some of the not just the the known and obvious hazards but you know some of the diseases that can happen just from rat droppings just accumulating in an area oh if you don’t mind let’s take a step back and just kind of intro we’re just excited to jump into let’s intro sam sam tell us a little about yourself what’s your role at servpro kind of tell us a little bit about serve pro my name is sam bear i work for the uh surfer of northwest st louis county we actually own surprise oakville mehlville afton webster groves clayton and ladue and northwest st. louis county we’re the largest area um i began my career actually as a entry-level worker about six years ago i started out as a technician helping somebody clean carpet and then moved into cleaning carpet moved into fire and water restoration moved into biohazard and mold remediation moved into project management and now i’m actually business development for all four of our franchises wow i guess when it came to covet you guys had plenty of masks and stuff on stock you guys were like the most prepared so we were but there was really no way to prepare for this unfortunately i mean no matter how many mess we have you’re gonna have fellow servpros that need things or you know even if you’re not a serve pro we kind of all work together in the restoration industry it’s it’s a contract connection that we talk about and we we may have a lot of things but we don’t have anywhere to get it afterwards so and even if we can we have to get it from or get it from a truck driver that has to deliver it across the united states that god forbid is still working and stuff you know it’s just nobody really has unless you’ve got a bunch of 55 gallon drums of hand sanitizer nobody really has anything that’s going to protect us for the longevity of what what’s going to happen here [Music] well we want to kind of focus on the biohazard cleanup stuff today but can you tell us a little bit just an overview of what servpro does in general because it seems like on your website you handle mold and all sorts of other stuff so surprise an emergency response contractor we will come out for any type of water in your home if there’s a fire any smoke damage cigarette smells in your home we will step into carpet cleaning if your home catches on fire we will go in and hand pack out every single item of your home put barcodes on it take photos of it categorize it and store it for you for months even if it takes five months ten months you know a year and a half to rebuild your product we have the facilities that we can store basically whole homes inside of our warehouse inside of all of us the bioremediation side is uh it’s it’s it’s a side that if you want to get into it you get into it nobody’s ever forced to do anything like that most of the time it’s a lucrative industry and once you start seeing things and doing things in a weird way you like to do it or you don’t like to do it it’s something where you can you can turn off the blood guts and gore and get through the day or the first time you go out you know you’re never gonna do this again there’s no one which side are you on sam i’ll do it every day all day every day it’s gotta take a really special person though i mean just like a a anyone that deals with you know some of those more sensitive issues of our society that i mean are you taking because taking it home every night and it weighing on your shoulders so it’s got it and and this is that next step this isn’t just you know the cop dealing with the situation this is the cleanup i try to treat myself the same way as any first responder uh they have given me a lot of insight on how to handle these things and when i come home and i take my uniform off i take my day off i i do not at the end of the day it when i leave star pro and i get inside of my house and i take my servpro uniform off i have to click out of everything i i can’t cross over personal life at work in any way shape or form not even just because of the biohazard but i throw away baby books i throw away wedding dresses i throw away high school memorabilia i throw away everything you keep in your home you keep in your basement and if your sewer backs up in your basement not even a biohazard incident you’re gonna throw everything away so i have to be the guy like on those hoarder shows that i i have to be stern i have to explain to them that this is for your health you have children in the home you have pets in the home you you can’t do it if there’s children’s and children in the home and it’s an uncomfortable situation there’s been times where we’ve refused jobs simply because when we go to leave i’m not going to leave a house in a condition that my mother my grandmother or i wouldn’t feel safe any of my family members in and and some of these companies out here will do that they just want to collect the small amounts of money um we want to do things right i’d rather not make money if i’m going to do it wrong i’d rather make it the right way or not make it at all and i’m i’m completely honest when i say that because i have to go to bed and sleep at night i can so the way you handle it is that you’re doing it right you’re leaving it any home behind in a condition that you’re you would leave your child in your mother or grandmother so the way you look at yourself and the way you carry are able to get through is that you’re knowing that you’re turning something back over in a condition that’s absolutely acceptable yes and sometimes the family members aren’t even allowed in the home um i’ve had i’ve been woken up at two o’clock in the morning by the police um to come to homes that the family members were outside and the police told them it was in their best interest to not go inside um we would sign paperwork and begin cleaning things up off the photos that we could walk back out of the home and and show the homeowner just they had a general concept of what had went on inside the home but sometimes i mean there’s button there’s guts and there’s gore and there’s there’s things that if you lose a family member you i don’t feel like you should have to go into the home of your family member that passed away and look at their body before you can get somebody to come clean it up that’s just not right you should be able to get help at any time if you have a homeowners insurance policy most most accidental deaths or anything else in the home recovered under the homeowner’s insurance and if not it doesn’t hurt to call and ask just find out what your deductible is it’s it sounds bad but it’s it’s just the same as a tree falling on your home or your home catching on fire this is what we have insurance for this is what we we pay to insure our homes for you know this is what what separates people from people that just occupy dwellings and have no right or no passage there you know so what is the what is the term biohazard specifically referred to biohazard’s going to be most of the time you’re trying to see cleanups it’s cleaning sanitizing deodorant deodorizing after any violent crime or a death in the home that has not been found so biohazard is anything kind of like human related it’s not like if there’s sewer back up that’s not considered biohazard biohazard is it mainly like kind of suicides or like deaths that happen that have have been sitting there for a while and stuff like that it’s when you’re handling you’re worrying more about handling materials because bloodborne pathogens and other things if you have a sewer back up if feces goes down your drain it’s been down your drain it’s been mixed into a sanitation line and it’s it’s contaminated but necessarily calling it biohazard is hard and a lot of times it’s because the insurance company writes you know what they’re going to code something as a family member that’s found deceased has to be put in as a certain way you can’t say that if if a little sewer backs up in a basement the concrete’s got to be drilled out but if somebody passes away in the basement there’s a large amount of blood on the concrete you’ll you’ll chip out the concrete you will remove everything that the blood touches blood so you’d actually have to chip out concrete you can’t clean and sanitize concrete i mean we think of concrete as the most solid surface but carpet wood even so concrete’s a very porous surface it has a little itty-bitty uh whenever you pour concrete you think you’re going to put a large amount of liquid down onto something and it’s going to push all the air back up to the top so you’re going to have little itty-bitty air bubbles in the top of all of it they’re going to be very very small whenever you get blood on any concrete that blood’s going to go inside of those little holes and six months later you can clean that blood off the concrete but you’re going to have a smell because blood has protein in it bacteria lives off of protein so all the bacteria anywhere in the home if it gets passed moved or comes anywhere near that it’s going to be attracted to it and that’s what you’re going to get your smell from you have to suffocate the bacteria in your sanitization process if you just try to kill the bacteria a lot of times what happens is if you don’t kill it all the way it’s going to come back twice as strong because it already knows what you’re fighting against it with it’s just like a human body is it’s it’s going to build immunities to things the worst thing you can do is put bleach on something and not kill all of it because bleach is the strongest and once something learns how to fight back against bleach and still lives there’s a lot of things i can put on it but it’s going to take a lot of things to fight back now so if you remove the concrete you’re removing any blood any protein from inside of that layer of the concrete now it’s concrete it’s solid you’re not gonna be don’t don’t think you’re gonna be removing six inches down in your concrete or something you know a lot of the times you use a hammer chisel and it’ll have a nice blade on it you can kind of chip along the surface to take it out just like if you had a tile floor you would definitely want to chip up any of the tile because your grout is supposed to be perfect and they claim your grout to seal it but everybody knows grout breaks away and peels over time so if you get a little bit of blood that seeps underneath the tile and if it’s tile it’s probably a kitchen honestly and and you start to smell that you’re gonna know when it comes to biohazard remediation if you mess up and you don’t do it right the homeowner’s gonna know there’s no way around it there’s too many smells there’s too many different things um i’ve done jobs before where you know you you gotta find all the teeth i mean it gets extensive into things and that goes back to the being my mother and my grandmother’s home if somebody passed away inside of a home and i don’t find a tooth and that woman comes walking upstairs and finds that i i might as well quit why why am i here you know there’s a lot of detail that you have to pay attention to and you have to handle everybody with care thanks i don’t mean to make it sound so intense it’s just but this is exactly what we never thought about right yeah so if you said if you don’t find a body in time what’s in time so if someone dies in a house how long do you have to discover them before they become a biohazard you want to find them day one um every day yeah to think otherwise i got that but finding them within a week or within a day is your best sometimes they sit for months sometimes depending on the weather i’ve i’ve had incidents where uh people passed away in a garage and it was the middle of the winter and if it’s the middle of the winter and you’re in a garage you’re not gonna there’s not gonna be smells you’re not gonna know and then three months later a family member comes over and goes to see where they’re at doesn’t see them goes to check the garage to see if the car’s in there and then they’re deceased in the garage and have been there for three months your your body your skin starts to thin your body starts to change over time the longer the longer it it takes to find someone after they’re deceased or the longer it takes for a biohazard situation the more expensive that it gets if you pass away on the main level of your home and and there’s blood involved it’s going to soak into the flooring material on that floor now a couple weeks later it’s going to drip down into the basement a couple weeks later you’re going to run into chipping out the concrete it’s the longer it’s there the longer it can soak in is the more expensive these projects get well i’m definitely not hungry for lunch anymore well so we had to um you know i called our like our attorney representative to ask about the sort of the laws around realtors listing properties for sale and whether they have to disclose whether there was a death in the property or not um what would you say are some laws and regulations around this biohazard cleanup i actually only know about the laws that govern um typically our staff uh yeah tell us about some of those i guess so my guys all have safety training um there’s there’s different companies you can go to to get that safety training i personally saw mine from a company called the amdicon um they are i believe based out of texas you there’s so many laws and rules as far as what i’m allowed to do and what i’m not allowed to do what you’re allowed to do as a realtor and what you’re not allowed to do what the police are allowed to do that i’ve only mainly focused on my rules i figured it was the best to get my rules and my laws down because i’m not there afterwards so i’m not there when the bill’s paid i’m not there when the flooring is put back in i’m not there when the house is put back on the market i see nothing further than the mitigation portion of the project so i don’t even know if if it’s disclosed afterwards um that that there was a death in the home um i don’t know any laws unfortunately about that just because i’m usually doing the next one by the time they’re selling the next home so um for example we just had a house burned down and then we have to just before we tear the house down we’re having to wait for it to be released from the insurance company and from the county and is it similar like if someone comes and they find a dead body i can’t imagine how terrible that situation would be first step i guess they call the police and then if it’s their house do they call insurance and then insurance calls you or and then you can’t go in until the police like release the scene i would presume so once the police officers we usually will get called once the police remove the body um we can’t do anything in the home until it’s been cleared as you know sometimes we’ll go in and they’ll be caution tape across a certain area of the home where they’re going to do an investigation but we needed to get to work right away you can call us first we will i i will meet anyone at any time and if they tell me hey i have a 500 insurance deductible i can tell you exactly what i can do for that 500 right now to get you into bash best shape so that we can file an insurance claim tomorrow we’re surprised has multiple franchises all over the country but we’re all independently owned and operated my server pro owner is from st was born and raised he is involved in everything that we do when i first started he was out on jobs training me getting involved with every project he will go out of town to fight the hurricane relief and everything so that’s that’s we can work with anyone to do anything and we’re in direct contact with each other at all times this isn’t a 1-800 system this is us we’re we’re local i was born and raised in south st louis my boss is from mehlville my my general manager is from mehlville there’s not a single out-of-towner here we just take care of our city that’s all we know how to do okay um let’s see we i had all these questions written down and you’ve kind of been answering some of them but so how long can biohazard sit before you have to rip out the wood floor is that you’re saying just a day maybe if you have to rip out the floor truthfully it doesn’t matter how long it’s there are you saying before you have to rip out the floor yeah oh you have to worry about the floor you have to rip out the floor there’s not a lot of option if more than like a teaspoon of blood falls on the floor you need to be ripping it out no if it’s a small amount of blood that immediately spattered on the floor then it’s it’s a different situation but if you come into a home and you’re not exactly sure how long the deceased has been there and you look at that floor you can look at hardwood floor and i i say you can because it’s something that i i do a lot but you can look at a hardwood floor sometimes and see the the distance in between the plants the wood if the wood is old if there’s been some slight water damage if there’s cupping if there’s bowing all those things are taken into an account and if any of those water damage signs are there for previous then you know that there’s a penetration point that the blood can get in between the floor what you can do is you can also go down in the floor below if you have the ability to and look at the subfloor if you start to see a staining down in the basement underneath your hardwood floor and you got hardwood floor here and then the plywood there if it’s already in the plywood the hardwood floor has to go um you’re gonna try to stain it or do anything in the world blood well it’s got a hard time coming out of things if you didn’t get it out of wood you would more than likely have to sand and refinish all of the wood anyway so one of the things that you’d take into account is this is a continuous floor throughout the same level or is there a line of sight that we can cut this off at a certain point you know most insurance companies if you’re going to pull out a hardwood floor what we would do is we would cut a five foot or five inch long strip with it we mail it to a company they’re called itel and ital can take a sample of any flooring they can detect the grade of it thickness of it the colors of it and it’ll search all united states to see if they can get it anywhere and if they can’t get it that’s how they can make the determination to replace the foreign or not but if they can get it out of the factory and it’s feasible it’s just your cost of repair replaced but there are companies that do that for hardwood floor for carpet um tile i’ve sent out samples of uh base molding and commercial building projects just because they had 15 floors of the same base molding and we removed 10 feet of it and they couldn’t find it so replacement is always an option it’s just is it what’s what’s going to what’s going to save you more money in the long run if someone’s deceased in a home you want to you want to get that home back to regular and sell it most of the time a lot of people don’t want to live in a deceased family member’s home you have a complete opposite side of that though that if if a mother and a father live in a home and a child’s deceased some of them never want to leave some of them want the bedroom to look exactly the same it was when it came before this happened you know it’s everyone’s different um you just have to have heart i know it sounds crazy and i know it sounds cheesy but you just have to listen to people you’re you’re dealing with probably the most complicated situation they’ve ever been in that they’ve never even wanted to deal with before if i go in and tell them you have to do this this and this and this they’re going to tell me to go home you know everybody wants to try to do things themselves but you get four hours into a cleaning project and realize that you know your your attachment your connection to this person you can call somebody then but you can’t get those four hours back you know that’s that’s your last four hours with the family member you don’t want those those last couple hours to be you fighting and trying to clean you know you should have time to mourn you should have time to to hug your family and and i’ll put on a suit and i’ll put on a respirator put on gloves i’ll put the whole suit on like ets in there and i’ll take care of everything for you that’s why we’re here yeah um kind of a weird question is blood the worst like thing that comes out of a body or stomach bile or something like that or what’s the worst thing without going into detail um when you pass away you lose muscle tension so anything that constricts in your body anything that holds anything in your body doesn’t hold anything in your body anymore so anything in your bowels anything in your bladder anything there’s there’s no muscle constriction or tightness and that’s worse than blood that’s worse than blood for like for cleaning up purpose or from like doing damage purpose a visual that’s i think that’s the only thing that visually when you look at it it’s just kind of like a dawning moment of like here i go i gotta clean this up it’s more of that’s not blood i know i know that’s something you would never expect somebody to say but i would rather have blood um i could see that because i mean once the body you know is deceased and it starts to fill with the gases and then it they you get a lot of fluids from the body that are very i don’t even know what they are but they’re fluids from the body in whatever way that is so i can’t imagine what it must be i swear to god we have a question from our audience here on our facebook live so they said to be safe what should you do if you find out there was a death in a home and you don’t know how long they had been there or where exactly they passed in the home um if you find out there’s a death in the home i i would hope you could speak to your realtor that’s the way that i’ve always understand things that was what you were bringing up earlier that i said i was not aware of i know that um i’m a dork and i’ve i’ve thought places were haunted before i’ve gone online and pulled tax records for my own dwellings that i’ve been in i’ve pulled newspaper articles before um i haven’t found anything thankfully but there’s there’s ways you can search around on the internet if there’s a death in the home you don’t know how long they’ve been there i guess the i guess the listener here is is saying it’s not like there’s a scene there’s not like blood or there’s not a body there they just found out that they i guess bought or renting or whatever a property where they’re where there was a death [Music] huh so we have we keep all of our paperwork on any bioremediation jobs that we do most leasing offices or companies i would think would be required to keep tax records of paperwork for multiple years this is a service that has to go in with a receipt so there’s taxes paid on it there’s there’s a paper trail there there has to be a paper trail for everything that i do every home i enter in and everyone has to keep a paper trail for any subcontractors or workers that they have in their home to prove that the necessary work has been completed if you can’t get that paperwork that means that what you’re thinking i in my personal opinion i would think would be true that that would be the only reason why someone would ever hide any type of paperwork from you yeah that’s just speaking of the paper trail adam though in regards to that then um you’re almost assuming that if you’re using a service like surf pro is there it’s got to be a insurance paper trail so i would think a clue report would show that probably yeah good point even if you don’t use insurance though anyone that keeps any records of their own if they paid personally um bioremediation is not a very a cheap process so if that’s something you paid for personally out of pocket i’m willing to bet you’re going to hold on to that receipt yeah it’s it’s not just he’s asking could there be unseen biohazard left by the body you would smell it you you would smell it for real even if it’s just like and the bricks down there or whatever or i mean in the concrete floor of the basement or something so in the restoration industry we get calls for water fire mold biohazard anything along those lines i cannot tell you how many times i’ve gone into homes for strange smells things that people can’t figure out sometimes a strange smell may be something that was left in the basement inside of a wall that you know a food wrapper from when they were finishing the basement or or it could be a biohazard situation it’s it’s funny to me and i used to think the same way honestly but if someone dies in your home or in in a dwelling you have to get that professionally clean there’s a reason why services like servpro were created there’s it’s not safe for for someone that has not been around bloodborne pathogens and other things like that to be down there with some some gloves that they got at the dollar store you know the yellow ones that go up for harm height that that all of our moms were when i was a kid my mom just went in the basement in port bleach on everything i i didn’t know if it was blood i didn’t know what it was but we’ve moved to a direction where we understand science we understand the the dangers of things and if you don’t clean it up right you can’t get away with not cleaning it up right you’re gonna there’s there’s gonna be evidence you’re dealing with human waste and things like that there’s just there’s no good way to hide something like that now if somebody cleaned it up and left and and you’ve moved in and they’ve been there when you get that smell unless you it’s something you smell before you may not even know what it is um it’s so do i know that smell if someone says i don’t know what the strange smell is it doesn’t smell like yeah that’s maybe there’s some kind of something can you come like air this thing out and you’re like you do you walk into a house and are you like oh oh i got this that’s what our agent said she said she opened the door she opened the door she smelled it and she said to her client step back like no uh this is you’re not going in here like the body was still there so i think like what the the question for the um listener was it you know assuming maybe some of it most of it was or they tried to clean it up so i would assume it would be more faint and not so obvious like it was for our agents that it’s there’s no way around even just a little bit left over like a hint in the air is much different than because i’ve walked into homes and i’m like i can’t pinpoint that it’s one of those things that once you realize what that smell is there is no way you’re gonna go through the rest of your life without ever knowing what that smell is when you smell it again it’s it’s not even something that i wish it was something you had to train your nose to because then there would be a way to undo that in some way but it’s um i’ve i had an instance one time where i had a family member that sister had passed away in a home we met her at the home she handed me the keys to the front door i asked her if she wanted to go inside with me and she said no the fire department told me it was bad and i don’t think i can see it when i opened the front door i knew i wasn’t going to find anything because there was no smell i walked straight in the home i had asked her where the back door was i walked straight home and went to open the sliding glass door because i was assuming that there was going to be something that i run into so that there would be the ability to air it out and i found nothing but when we went to walk in the house in the very beginning i told her right off the bat that there’s nothing that smells in here i don’t think we’re gonna find anything there was maybe a five inch in diameter blood spot from when a family member had hit their head but the the police option the firefighters you know if it’s a if it’s a rookie firefighter that hasn’t seen that many incidences he he could tell a family member that it’s that bad if you get a veteran firefighter that’s seen a thousand of them something that may be bad to the family member the the firefighter isn’t gonna think that’s bad you know every like i keep saying every situation is different but if you walk into a home and there’s blood or or been somewhat you’re you’re gonna smell it if it wasn’t cleaned up properly and also a uv light if you don’t clean up blood it’s just like csi everything gloves you can see if somebody cleans something up with bleach more than likely they’re going to smear that blood around a whole whole bunch whenever they’re cleaning it up so if it’s not wiped and cleaned and disinfected properly all you’re going to have is a big glowing area that’s just diluted it’s it’s glowing slightly less than the rest of it but most people aren’t trained to do this so it’s it’s very easy to miss things things that you would think aren’t a big deal at all could end up being the biggest curtains curtains in a bedroom are my biggest headache in the world because curtains can be cleaned but there’s no feasible way to get a thin sheer curtain soaking wet so if someone passes away by a suicide in a home they want the room to look exactly the same way it does and i you can’t get blood out of everything yeah so have you ever been involved in like solving a crime or have you had to testify in court or anything like that no uh we’re always trying that if if i find any evidence at all i stop everything that i’m doing tell everyone to leave the room and shut the door and call the police we don’t disturb move touch if i find a shell casing anything we’re calling the police right away that being said you you find notes to loved ones when we find those we have to stop everything we’re doing and call the police we want to put our stuff happen these kind of things have happened i guess yes we have to put ourselves in a safe place where we we’re not contaminating a scene we’re not making things any worse that we’re only really truly helping um and i i can’t even foresee a court type situation just because the cause of death and the investigations typically done at the morgue and if they’re pulling the body out of a home they’re not going to remove a body if there’s any foul play or anything that they still need to figure out at the home nowadays technology is amazing we the videos that i was trained with were all vhs tapes i know it sounds so funny but we take camera phone pictures now of everything um i’m guilty of it i’ll i’ll do a walkthrough and record my whole site just to make sure that i know what’s going on we will open up all the drawers to make sure that there’s no blood splatter in the drawers well since i opened up all your drawers now the second i open it up i’m going to take a picture of the top of it because i’m going to show you where everything was in the drawer so that when i lift everything up i can prove to you that i put it all back in the right place that’s something that i do as a personal thing that i want everyone to understand that we care about your things that i’m not coming through here and just ripping things out and throwing things away and doing this and doing that because when you’re throwing away important things they have to see that you care about the rest of their things at the same time i’m going to throw away something that means the world to you but i can save 90 of your other belongings please understand that i wouldn’t be telling you to throw this away if you didn’t have to yeah that makes sense um kind of a couple more random questions if you got a couple more minutes sam yes sir um so i don’t think that i’m some sort of criminal but i had some muriatic acid for it was for my pool and i spilled it on the concrete in my garage and it did that kind of like ate away the concrete i was wondering if you guys ever use that or do you actually have to do the chipping away thing so muriatic acid has um it’s it’s a chemical uh we don’t use any chemicals everything we use our disinfectant is a natural botanical disinfectant it’s called concrobium um you can drink it i know that sounds crazy but i i have been face to face with a customer in their home trying to explain to them that i’m here to disinfect things that i know you’re afraid of cleaners but you know your kids are going to be safe you’re this is safe around your pets and when they don’t believe me i will spray that disinfectant in my mouth i’m not kidding a spray won’t kill you a drink won’t kill you but it has a peppermint extract in it that is a bug cleaner or a bug disinfectant as well bug spray i’m sorry and it doesn’t taste good but it’s safe your dog could walk up and and lick the disinfectant off the ground and your dog is going to be fine is that kind of the purpose of not using any chemicals is that so that people don’t dogs don’t lick it or whatever i mean it started off because everyone wanted to be green and eco-friendly i remember getting into the industry and people would ask me all the time if the products i was using was green and when i was 19 and 20 years old i’ve looked at people been like no it’s clear what are you talking about i wouldn’t spray something green on your carpet and then i found out later what they were what they were talking about uh most products that are chemicals that clean don’t clean they etch off the surface of what you’re cleaning so when you’re putting acid on the top of of the concrete you’re burning through your concrete when you use even soft scrub soft scrub has bleach in it i can’t use bleach because soft scrub doesn’t get your grout lines cleaner it just rips off the top coating on them because the underneath coating is a little bit more shiny most most of the cleaners and chemicals that have those harsh chemicals in them is to deteriorate the surface because i mean it is cleaning but i can’t come in as a paid professional and deteriorate the surface of your floor i can’t come in and use something that i’m gonna spray on it that may keep eating through your concrete for the next six months you know when you spray muriatic acid unless you’re going to get online and figure out your exact portions to put it in what your dwell time is and everything that’s going on when i leave that neurotic acid can’t still be burning through your floor because then everyone comes over and walks on it with a bare foot i don’t have a job and and more than that i hurt your kid that’s what i care about i think that’s really interesting because i mean in our um you know in our head the first thought is like what you don’t use chemicals to clean up biohazard that seems like kind of an oxymoron they take this stuff away though i guess i can kill the corona virus in 10 minutes with the same chemical why can’t it kill some blood so what chemical what oh but it’s not a chemical it’s a disinfectant it’s called concrobium it’s a broad spectrum disinfectant most of your companies used to use a product called microban micro ban has taken over in a lot of hospitals you’ll see their seal on top of a lot of things concrobium came out i first saw it probably about three years ago and it was in a clear bottle the first time i saw it and i didn’t believe in it had no clue what it was um but then when i read the science behind it i met the regional concrobium person he explained to me everything and i watched my boss take a shot of it i started to believe in it and then when i was at work i realized that it was my go-to this is the same thing that if i cut my hand open on a job i’m pouring it into this is the same thing that if if my pet in my home uses the restroom on the floor this is my go-to and it is it’s amazing i’ve never seen anything like it like i said when i was a kid they put bleach on everything and and i had no clue that that’s why our bacteria got so bad it’s because it learned to fight back against all the things we were putting on it and not killing it and it’s called clear generation bleach is the standard yes is c-o-n-c-r-o-b-i-u-m and chromium mold control it says there’s a mold control and a broad spectrum disinfectant there’s two different types we actually carry both of them as well is it something you can get over the counter i mean i use botanicals to clean like in the house but i’ve also stepped it up and now yeah you can get a gallon on amazon for 50 bucks it’s a balance spectrum yep it’s about 50 to 55 i know you can get it locally at um there’s a store called john don john don’s your major supplier for most of your restoration companies in the st louis area um they’re also who we take a lot of our training classes with but they sell everything that is it’s i’m like a kid in a toy store when i go in there it’s unbelievable the place and the things that they might have to check out this store it’s nice geyser i’m just gonna go over there and get me some uh concrobium and concrobium yeah don jon it’s called jon don j-o-n-d-o-n jon don okay yeah so we got to start wrapping it up here i know you’re a busy guy but if you don’t mind can i ask you just like one or two more questions yeah um one of the things i’ve noticed i have a house that we i’m representing the buyers we put under contract they’re going to close and you know for four weeks or so and they’re really concerned you know we’ve noticed different types of people handling covid kind of the way they handle their lives differently um and so one of the things that they’re wanting to do before they move in is have the place like have the new house like covid cleaned you know and i guess since they’re going to use movers to move their stuff then they might want to have their stuff then coveted cleaned because the you know the movers have touched it so are you guys getting involved in any sort of covid cleaning or anything like that yes um i stepped into this role actually on the first of the year’s business development and unfortunately i did not think that this covered thing was coming as quickly as it was um what we’ve been doing for the past month and a half is we’re the ones on facebook and twitter that are disinfecting for fire departments police departments ambulances fire trucks we’ve done over 2 000 police vehicles we’ve done over 100 fire houses we’ve done over 100 police stations we were worried about our first responders they’re best friends we have to have them they have to put out fires in order for me to fix fires they have to to stop leaks and things before we can get in there and do things as far as sprinkler heads we’ve just moved into businesses now with the restaurants opening in the area anything under 10 000 square feet i’ve actually been given the green light to handle myself me and the other people from our marketing side will come out in tie-back suits and fully fog everything and wipe all your touch points if you were planning on moving your home if it was me the process or the way i would do it would be pay those movers if you want to have them pack up all your stuff and move all your stuff get everything in the home get everybody out and then get it disinfected and move your family in you don’t want to get it disinfected until everything’s all moved in in place if you even wanted to be safer have your couple family members or your house warming thing before you get disinfected the big thing about any disinfection services is is i can disinfect anything that’s happened before me but when you bring a new person into the building you’re you’re bringing a new factor in so i can’t guarantee that when john or joe or larry walks in the door to come see your place they’re not bringing something new in so if you know you’re going to have some people over you know that you want to entertain in house warmer or do whatever do it in a safe social distancing do it with a mask on and then when you’re ready to start your life with your family and your new home disinfect your home please yes so are you guys like coming in and wiping you know unpacking a box and wiping the thing and putting it on the shelf are you saying you’re coming in with like a fog or something so we can come in with a fog and wipe the way we’ve been doing it is so we would fog the main areas fog over the top of anything and then as a as an employee walks through a home everything that they think that they would touch or that they think people touch or all those common places like six feet up in the air on the hallway around the turn where you put your hand wherever you’re going to make a corner you know things like that or things were wiping doing the first responders vehicles was the healthiest and best thing i think for our company to ever do because it let us really look at a bunch of different things and try to figure out what what even is a touch point what what are you even touching inside of a car you know are you touching your blinkers are you touching your cupholders are you touching this every ambulance that i got into had a different cabinet a different way to open up a drawer a different thing for you to be intrigued with that you would want to know what it is so that’s why you have to have people like me and people in our industry that do that is because i’m excited you saw me just smile talking about it is if i can find those places so that you don’t have to find those places then that’s my whole purpose of being here that’s what’s awesome about this is if i can come in and clean everything and you don’t get sick i did it you know we do i love it i might need to hire you guys for my car because i noticed there seems to be like barbecue sauce and everything from when i went through some oh i’ve been in your car adam it’s that i um all right so um can you give us how can the listeners contact you how can anybody get a hold of you so i am sort of pro of northwest saint louis county uh my direct phone numbers 314-461-2020 now i’m working from home and i’m in marketing that being said i have my phone on me 24 hours a day i would prefer to answer any calls during business hours but if you if anybody out there has a question call me no question there’s a question emergency sorry is there just like a regular serve pro number you want them to call or is that the best that’s my cell phone number you can also contact our business um they’re all googleable as servpro of oakville melville affton webster groves clayton ladue and northwest st louis county the direct phone number is 314-846-0600 i just always give out my cell phone number because when you call the office after hours it’s typically for emergency situations it’s it’s someone at home on call that’s going to respond to a home within an hour to help out if you just have a question or something that’s been bugging you or eating you up call me because i’m working from home um i’m reaching out to businesses and asking them if we can come help them and if i can’t help a business i can help a human then if somebody’s uneasy or uncomfortable or needs the peace of mind i also being involved in this i know where to find things on the internet i have no websites or cdc or you know osha regulations or any of those things so if you’d ever have a dispute or you need some concrete evidence we can usually lead you in the right direction if you need a subcontractor if you had your floor ripped up or anything i’ve been doing this a while i grew up in st louis i’ve been in the industry for six years i was in construction for four before that i’m a hometown guy and and we know our local guys we know our family businesses and you know the people that we really do need to be helping out the most during this pandemic we need to help our local things well sam would you say it’s uh okay for me to say that i hope that i never have to call you but if i do i know i’ll be in good hands i always tell people i’m a good person to know in a bad situation okay i’m here that makes sense yeah oh okay i like that i i buy that any final questions for mr sam shannon or anything else you want to say sam um i mean this has been great i we really appreciate your time this is a crazy subject but don’t watch too much id oh i i will though i do i love it just don’t overthink it because then when you run into the situation you’ll spend an hour trying to find evidence that isn’t even there right all right well thank you guys very much i certainly appreciate it um for anybody who’s listening that has questions comments reach out to us via podcast@hermannlondon.com ideas for future episodes whatever we’d love to hear from you and uh give us a call for all your real estate needs right shannon yes absolutely we appreciate it and give sam a call for all your cleaning and restoration needs anytime you guys call yeah all right thanks everybody i’m gonna call thank you