A day in the life of a biohazard cleaner, who scrubs sites contaminated with the coronavirus

He also does the grocery shopping for his family, since he already has to go outside for work.

"I'm the only one really leaving," he said. "They're staying home and I'm fine with that. I just don't think it's worth it right now, especially where we are in this valley."

If he does come home directly after a job, he strips everything off before walking into the house.

"I don't walk through any further than my mud room," he said. "The virus isn't going to get into your house unless you bring it in there."

The machine measures for adenosine triphosphate (ATP), an organic compound that powers living cells. The higher the ATP reading, the dirtier the surface — and the more likely the coronavirus will linger on it.

His team typically samples a surface of around four-square inches, he said.

"You get an even coat on whatever you spray it on," he said. "If I pointed at a cup on my desk, it'll actually wrap around the back of the cup."

To disinfect an entire room, Chalmers uses a machine that releases the same mist.

"We just turn it on, seal the room up or close the door, leave, come back 10 minutes later, and it's disinfected," he said.

The formula Chalmers uses is strong enough to kill C. diff, a bacteria that most disinfectants (including hand sanitizer) have trouble eliminating. The coronavirus is much weaker, he said.

"We're talking about an envelope virus, which on the scale of microorganisms is the very easiest to kill," he said. "So we even use something that's overkill for the job, but we want to make sure."

Human hands carry clusters of germs and bacteria called biofilm that resist disinfectants. That means spraying a disinfectant on a surface won't automatically clean it. First, Chalmers has to absorb the biofilm with a dry towel or rag.

"It's really the part that everyone misses is picking up and removing that soil load," he said. "A lot of people spray a surface and then wipe it around right away. But you're not letting the disinfectant do its job."

Restaurants have had to make tough decisions about throwing things away, Chalmers said.

"Sometimes they let go of a lot of their inventory in exchange to know that it's clean," he said. "They'll just say, get rid of all food unless it's in a metal can. We don't keep anything that's wrapped in paper."

Before the pandemic, Steri-Clean was used to cleaning smaller sites. When coronavirus-related calls came flooding in by the second week of March, there was a bit of a learning curve, Chalmers said.

"We might go to an industrial accident site where someone gets hurt and we have to go clean up blood or something, but to clean a million square foot office or factory, that's new territory for us," he said.

In some cases, he will interview an infected person about where they traveled to avoid cleaning an entire site. Other jobs, like the mall in Texas, require more research.

"They called at 10 o'clock at night and wanted to reopen at nine in the morning," Chalmers said. "They wanted the entire mall disinfected."

Instead, he suggested reviewing the security footage to see where the infected person had traveled.

"We literally could watch him walk throughout the mall so we knew exactly what stores he was in," he said.

"I honestly feel that's when I'm the safest is being in an environment like that," he said. "I'm probably more in danger in our own community going to the grocery store."

"We do police cars for free and ambulances for free just to keep our first responders safe," he said.

Cleaning a car is a one-person job, he said, but the requests are so frequent that some Steri-Clean employees scrub cars all day long. The process typically takes about 45 minutes to one hour per car, he said.

On Tuesday, Chalmers spent an hour cleaning a car that belonged to a police officer with a confirmed case of COVID-19.

"I spent a little bit more time on it just because I knew it was a confirmed case," he said. That meant scrubbing down everything — including the dashboard, radio, siren, spotlights, radar, microphone, and door handles.

Chalmers said he usually works around 16-hour days. Few of his employees are working their typical eight-to-five shifts anymore, he said.

"We have big jobs where we have teams rotating through and they're working 24 hours," he said.

One of his customers right now is a large oil company. Those jobs are the toughest, he said, because big facilities have lots of equipment that need to be cleaned and disinfected.

"You really need to understand where your touch points are," he said. "I'm not really concerned about COVID floating around and landing on top of a machine because even if it's there, it's going to die eventually and no one is going to touch it. But all your levers and handles — everywhere were hands go — that's what we need to clean first."

Blaine County is small (around 23,000 residents), but it has an infection rate of 2% — higher than the rate in New York City.

Chalmers said he's probably the only person in town who has been trained in biohazard cleaning and infection control. That forced him to take on new responsibilities in his role as Steri-Clean's CEO.

In addition to taking calls from customers and writing estimates for large corporations, he's now scrubbing down local sites.

"When we moved to Sun Valley, Idaho, I didn't really plan on doing a lot of cleaning," he said. "Then this broke here and we started to get hundreds and hundreds of cases in this little area."