I see the aftermath of personal injuries all the time, all the time, in this field.
Its amazing to me that people can often find trouble in some of the most innocuous places, doing some of the most mundane, everyday behaviors.
A lot of the time, I get called to come out after someone has injured themselves cracking their head open on the edge of the bathtub as they slipped stepping out of the shower. Other frequent calls we receive involve accidental stabbings when a person has missed the steak and stuck their hand instead. We get a fair amount of clients in the construction field, as you might imagine, and those calls in particular always seem to be the nastiest to clean up.
One incident that comes to mind, took place at the beginning of the building season earlier this spring, when the snow and mud of winter have taken their leave, making construction possible in the Northeast and other snowy climes.
A homeowner had called in a panic, describing a scene straight out of a war or horror movie by the amount of blood she said was left behind after an accident involving a roofing contractor.
Apparently, the man had gone onto the roof of the two story home alone to measure out how much material he would need to repair a section over the garage. Putting his foot down in the wrong spot, he slid down the roof and fell into the glass patio table below.
While the shattering of the glass more than likely saved him from smashing his head open on the tiled pool and patio area, it ended up slicing his leg nearly to the bone as a thick shard from the table hit him just right.
As the homeowner called paramedics, the rest of the roofing crew carefully pulled their boss from the broken glass and attempted to wrap the injury to stop bleeding. When that didn’t work, they moved the man inside so that, quote, “ he wouldn’t die outside like an animal’.
Standing inside the home, looking at the back room just adjacent to the pool, I could see why they had thought that he was going to die. There was an ungodly amount of blood covering the floor. In fact, there was such a deep puddle of the red stuff, that you could no longer see the grout grooves in the tile any more.
Since the blood had begun to dry, it was a pain to remove, but slowly we started to win the battle. Many people don’t know this, just the ones who have ever encountered large volumes of blood like doctors, medics, police and crime scene technicians will know what I’m talking about when I say this, but blood has a smell. A sweet, sickening smell. With a mental note to it. No, I don’t mean heavy metal, like the music genre. I mean that you can literally smell the iron and copper in our bodies when enough blood is present at a scene.
This home reeked of blood. Even after we had methodically removed every last drop of plasma, and then deep cleaned and sanitized the area, we still had to use the Ozone Machine to completely eliminate odors on a molecular scale. Thats how much blood this man lost.
And yet he lived. A quick thinking homeowner, once a nurse in her younger years, and taken one of her designer belts to use as a tourniquet. It very well may have saved this man’s life.
All in all, the job took just two days from start to finish, and at the end I could tell that the older woman who owned the home was beside herself with joy. I couldn’t imagine what it would have been like to be in her position, though I always try because compassion for our clients is as important, if not more, than a strong stomach. Last I heard, the roofer had suffered permanent damage to the structure of his lower leg and after four or five unsuccessful operations to graft bone onto the fracture, and with the wound constantly being disturbed, he ended up losing the part of his leg below the point of injury. But I’m told he is thankful everyday for being alive, so grateful to the homeowner, in fact, that the roof was repaired free of charge.
You don’t want to try and attempt to clean up a crime scene or accident scene. Blood and other bodily fluids can contain dangerous pathogens which pose a significant risk to human health. Our scene cleanup technicians will decontaminate and remove any blood, tissue or bodily fluids a crime and trauma scene has left behind. Advanced Bio Treatment is a professional scene cleaning company.
Regardless of whether the scene is at your home and personal property, a commercial business, or industrial site, we’ll strictly adhere to OSHA regulations and API Worksafe guidelines in our cleanup efforts. We only deploy EPA registered hospital grade cleansers and disinfectants.