20 September 2015 – Author: Ava Benny-Morrison – Source: Sydney Morning Herald
A septic tank had to be dug up, bedrooms gutted, land decontaminated and surfaces scrubbed.
Making the house, north of Sydney, habitable again after it was used for an elaborate meth lab was no small or cheap feat.
“That job was $250,000 by the time it was finished,” said Robert Gale, Sydney-based operations manager and hygienist.
This is a glimpse into the booming cleaning and remediation industry that has prospered on the back of Australia’s ice epidemic.
What used to be a niche market is now lucrative, with many businesses tuning their skills to take advantage of the upward trend in meth lab busts.
In 2013-14, 744 drug labs were busted across the country, almost double that of a decade earlier, according to the Australian Crime Commission.
Once a drug lab is uncovered, the local council is notified and it then falls to the homeowner to decontaminate it.
A hygienist is employed to swab the property and record the contamination levels before quotes are sought from remediation companies on what it will cost to make the place liveable again.
Ahmad Merhi has been in the meth lab cleaning business since 2010, when the workload was about five jobs a year. Now the company remediates an average of 100 drug labs annually across Australia and New Zealand.
The head technician from Living Fresh says clandestine labs aren’t found only in backyard sheds, kitchens and discreet rural blocks.
He recently cleaned a lab in an “elite class” apartment building, fit with a concierge, on top of a bustling Sydney shopping centre.
Thinking back on some of the worst cases he has come across, Mr Merhi remembers a house that had turned yellow from the iodine used in the chemical cocktail to manufacture methylamphetamine.
“There were Coke cans on the kitchen bench that were yellow,” he said. “It was like someone walked into this house and spraypainted it.”
NSW Drug Squad Detective Inspector Michael Cook has noted a trend in labs popping up in Sydney’s rural outskirts, like Richmond and the Hawkesbury area, where they don’t attract much attention.
“It’s those semi-rural areas where there is a bit of space around the house, where you can come and go and don’t attract as much attention,” he said.
Some cooks go to unusual lengths to cover their tracks – like covering tap fittings and door handles in plastic to combat the corrosion – but it’s often the innocent homeowners left to grapple with the consequences.
At an elaborate lab the drug squad uncovered in Kenthurst a few years ago, chemical waste was being chucked over the back balcony onto the soil below.
“When the professionals came to do an assessment of what work needed to be undertaken, because it was a rented house and the owners were all paying for all of this, the report was about 50 pages,” Detective Inspector Cook said. “And we were told the report itself cost about $20,000 before any work was done.”
Mr Merhi spoke of one man left with a $25,000 remediation bill after the tenant in the granny flat below his home produced meth and the chemicals seeped up through his wooden floorboards.
A quote from Living Fresh, which uses a decontamination foam over demolition, for a standard two-bedroom unit can range from $15,000 to $20,000. Quotes can go into the hundreds of thousands of dollars when demolition is involved.
“It’s very profitable,” Mr Merhi said of the industry.
That is on top of employing a hygienist.
Mr Gale said once contamination levels get into the 1000s of micrograms, “you just can’t clean it. It is very resilient.”
With an increasing number of current and new businesses seeking meth lab clean-up training, Scott McFadzen estimates there are now 50 companies in Australia equipped to do the job.
Mr McFadzen, the Specialised Cleaning and Restoration Industry Association (SCRIA) president, said five years ago there were only a handful of businesses equipped to clean drug houses.
