Around
the time New Yorkers started fretting over the city’s first diagnosis
of Ebola last Thursday, Sal Pain began drawing up plans for four
decontamination chambers, customized for a cramped Harlem hallway.
The narrow dimensions of the hallway — it was only four feet wide — outside the fifth-floor apartment Dr. Craig Spencer, the Ebola patient, shares with his fiancée
was among the more difficult situations confronted by
hazardous-materials workers in their efforts to contain the Ebola virus.
The standard decontamination station, a bulging, inflatable unit, would
not do.
So
Mr. Pain, the chief safety officer for Bio-Recovery Corporation, which
has cleaned Dr. Spencer’s apartment and the Gutter, a bowling alley Dr.
Spencer had visited in Brooklyn, improvised. He lined the hallway walls
with 6 millimeters of plastic on Friday morning, and then made a frame
out of PVC pipe. About 12 hours later, after sterilizing everything from
four bicycles to a cuticle cutter, the 10-member crew stood in the
hallway and washed themselves with chemical and water showers.
As
public officials sought to quell fear among New Yorkers, Mr. Pain and
his team worked in the trenches, trying to make those reassurances real.
Despite the low chances that Dr. Spencer had contaminated the bowling alley he visited on Wednesday, the night before he registered a fever, a hazardous-materials crew worked from about 10 p.m. Friday to 5 a.m. Saturday to stanch any doubt.
Wearing
$1,500 protective suits, the crew of around 10 workers wiped down video
game consoles and toilet seats, pool cues and billiard balls. They
reached inside the finger holes in the bowling balls with a wire brush
and a rag dipped in chemical cleaners.
The
bowling alley’s smooth floors and concrete walls simplified the
cleaning, Mr. Pain said, but Dr. Spencer’s apartment was more cluttered.
He also did not expect the apartment to be as big as it was, over 1,000
square feet. The workers had only enough oxygen tanks for a much
smaller job. So the New York Fire Department pitched in, giving the
Bio-Recovery crew the extra tanks they needed to scrub until midnight on
Friday.
By
then, Mr. Pain said, they had combed every surface of Dr. Spencer’s
home. Certain high-contact items were removed: bedding, soap from the
shower, personal hygiene products and food. (The Ebola virus, Mr. Pain
said, lives longer in cold environments like that of a refrigerator.)
Most
of their possessions survived, but only after enduring a chemical
assault. The floor was cleaned in part with a 10 percent bleach
solution, the method that Mr. Pain said was recommended by the Centers
for Disease Control and Prevention. Other products were sterilized with
intense heat, or an antimicrobial hospital-grade sanitizer that smelled
like lemons. Mr. Pain’s chemical of choice, though, was a product
developed by a federal government laboratory whose name he said he was
not at liberty to reveal.
Mr.
Pain was also prohibited from saying whether workers encountered any
bodily fluids in the home. “It definitely needed cleanup,” he said.
Workers sanitized couches, four bicycles and “all other sorts of people
stuff,” Mr. Pain recalled. No item was too small; even a safety pin in
Dr. Spencer’s medicine cabinet was doused in chemicals.
He
continued, “It’s for us to be comfortable, and for the doctor when he
gets home to be comfortable.” Dr. Spencer’s fiancée, Morgan Dixon,
returned to the apartment on Saturday evening.
In
his line of work, Mr. Pain said, public officials are as often a
hindrance as they are a source of support. Bio-Recovery, which is based
on Long Island, had firsthand experience with such bureaucratic barriers
in Dallas a few weeks ago, when public officials offering them a
contract refused to pay for the most secure protective equipment, Mr.
Pain said.
New
York City officials, on the other hand, drew on weeks of extensive
preparation, Mr. Pain said. Even before Dr. Spencer’s Ebola test came
back positive, Bio-Recovery was working on drafting a contract with the
city. Mr. Pain stayed on the phone with high-level officials until 3
a.m. on Friday.
“They gave us carte blanche to get it done,” Mr. Pain said.
Actually, their work may not be done. Several hours after a 5-year-old boy was rushed to the hospital
Sunday night with symptoms consistent with Ebola, Mr. Pain was drafting
a cleanup plan with city officials for the boy’s Bronx home.
Debra
Sharpe, a Birmingham, Ala., biosafety expert who has run a company that
trained workers to handle biological agents, said that only a handful
of companies across the country were equipped to perform such cleanups.
But, she added, cleaning locations like the bowling alley, that are
unlikely to be contaminated, only spreads anxiety.
“If
you say that you cannot transmit Ebola if you’re not showing symptoms,
then you don’t need to go clean the bowling alley,” she said. “I think
you’re giving the public a mixed signal.”
Mr. Pain said that his crew, which also helped New York City during the anthrax
scare in 2001, is working under an unprecedented level of scrutiny.
News cameras surrounded them as they walked out of Dr. Spencer’s
apartment with what he estimated was about 1,000 pounds of material,
most of it the crew’s equipment. Even hedge fund investors have started
calling his office, hoping to capitalize on the sudden clamor for the
company’s services.
“Most of the time, it’s just another day at the office,” Mr. Pain said. “But this one actually got me.”
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