The company’s owner, Brian Woronuik, works as a firefighter and recruits a lot of his staff through word of mouth. Kreklau started his job about five years ago, after his work as a 911 dispatcher for a fire department came to an end. “Something that’s going to be overwhelming and unmanageable for them - we can make a dirty situation new again.” “We get to meet a lot of really nice people and we get to make a difference in their life,” he says of the family and friends of the deceased. Despite the hazards, Kreklau is committed to his work. But their jobs are crucial in a city where death and trauma are a regular occurrence. These are the people who do what no one else wants to. They’ll take apart furniture that has been contaminated with bodily fluids, rip out the carpets and disinfect the entire home to make it habitable again. Over the next two weeks, Kreklau and two technicians will remove all the garbage that has piled up in the apartment. Most of the furniture will need to be taken apart and disposed of. Kreklau and his co-workers look into the bedroom where the deceased was found. He leads a team of about 10 bioremediation technicians. Kreklau, 31, is the operations manager for 1st Trauma Scene Clean Up - one of a handful of companies in Metro Vancouver that specializes in remediating crime scenes, unattended deaths and industrial accidents. “It’s shocking at first when you get into the line of work but it doesn't take too long to figure out whether you’re the type of personality that’s going to be able to deal with it day to day,” Kreklau says. He and his team are there to assess and repair the damage left behind. Kreklau says, in many cases he deals with, the person likely suffered from a mental illness that kept them from being able to care for themselves properly. Coroners Service says last year there were 2,424 sudden or unexpected or sudden deaths in private residences throughout the province. It's not clear how long they had been living this way. This is the living room of the person who died alone. Photos of smiling family members hang on the wall and sit on the mantel. Nearby, a small container of mouldy McDonald’s fries lies at the edge of the hallway.
The source is in the bedroom, where a decomposing body was found weeks after the person died. If Kreklau were to remove his respirator, the odour would resemble a potent version of a farmer’s field recently laid with manure. Curtis Kreklau stands in the middle of a one-bedroom East Vancouver apartment packed with half-empty takeout containers, empty pill bottles and broken furniture.
0 kommentar(er)
