You can imagine we have done some pretty strange jobs in our time. But the worst always seem to involve dead bodies.
We were called to a block of council flats one day by the council. A couple were complaining about a bad stain on the ceiling of their sitting room. They thought it was paint that had been spilled in the flat above. They were wrong. What had actually happened was that the occupant of the flat had got out of bed, tripped and hit his head on the wall. He died that day. About two weeks later in the heat of the summer his head fell off. About three weeks after that bits of him started seeping through the floor and dripping into the flat below. It was a difficult job to clean and sanitise because as soon as we put any liquid down, the whole thing just came alive again with bacteria.




This duct sucks out the
air in a mortuary


The mortuary in a local hospital called us in to clean out their ventilation system. This sucked the air from around the bodies while they were undergoing a post-mortem so you can imagine what else was sucked up with the air.

The risk from infection was incalculable. We wore two body suits for the whole job. But the funny thing was that on the last day we smelled cooking onions from the hospital kitchen. Now usually, the ventilation system would blow that smell away. But if we could smell onions then that means when the system was turned back on... No. It does not bear thinking about.


Another nasty job involved an old man who was tortured and killed in his flat. The police called us in to clean it up but we were still left with a rather expensive sofa on which the old man had been dismembered. It was a hotbed of bacteria and infection. We briefly thought about putting it out in a skip for the council to collect but it was obvious that someone would have taken it for their home not knowing the risks. So we were left with no choice but to take it apart and destroy the bits.