Realtors encountering a property with an odd chemical odor or a house dirty enough to have cockroaches, but missing them, may need to be extra wary for their client’s sake, especially if the property is a foreclosure, says Tommy Farmer, director of the meth task force. These items may be indicators of a former meth house.
If a client buys a foreclosed property that has not been quarantined for meth remnants when it should have, will be responsible for the clean up, a bill that could run anywhere from $5,000 to $25,000. There has also been a major shift in meth manufacturing from the red phosphorous and pseudo ephedrine method to “shake and bake,” a one pot anhydrous method that is now 70 percent of all meth lab seizures across the state, Farmer says.
This means that methamphetamine can now be made in a bottle as small as a two-liter soda bottle with a 16-ounce soda bottle gaser and tubes attached. Now smaller, quicker, and more mobile, meth production can be done anywhere, not just a home. The new method also produces components that are not as toxic as before, but produce an all time high potential for fire and explosion. “It used to be a matter of if you had a fire, now it’s a matter of when,” Farmer says. “You are going to catch yourself on fire or blow yourself up with this method here.”
A member of the Tennessee National Guard Counter Drug Task Force says there are two parts to meth cleanup. First, a meth lab is discovered and the actual apparatus to make meth and the components are seized, neutralized and taken away. The second part is the contaminated house that’s left behind. Before February of this year, all the components from the lab were collected and HAZMAT took them away, but funding was lost that paid for this process, leaving Tennessee, the state with the largest number of meth seizures in the nation, with no way to clean up labs. This meant a bill for $2,500 every time a lab was found, with 2,000 labs a year on average.
This led to the current method of cleaning, the container system. In this, components are gathered, neutralized and put into a HAZMAT safe container system that is emptied all at once, saving clean-up contractors from visiting every meth lab and reducing the bill for each emptying to $500. Farmer says, “We have a duty and an obligation to provide for the safety of our citizens and to act on cleaning up these labs. It’s like a loaded gun lying in a park.” While they take the immediate hazard out of the community, the house clean up is still there along with the contamination potential, he says. After removal of the initial hazard, the EPA says responsibility for remediation (cleaning the property) shifts to the property owner. The property is quarantined and release of quarantine is not granted until the property is inspected, cleaned and given a letter of fitness.
While the neutralization and removal of the meth components is $500, the average cost of remediation is between $5,000 and $25,000. The average cost just to test a property is $12,000, and then there has to be a second testing, Farmer says. “Meth is a problem, but we are not proposing that we know the solution and can change the course of it tomorrow and that it’s the biggest cost factor to us. It’s not that,” Farmer says. “It’s meth labs, and the total impact that they have on our community that is devastating and is costing us so much money.”
A meth lab itself costs about $350,000 per incident when adding the cost to train those in removal, the protective equipment that’s needed, the resources, the cost of healthcare, childcare, social services, schools, incarceration, the court system, the health department, and so on. In 2010, the cost to U.S. taxpayers for meth related incidents was somewhere around $23 billion. “This is not a law enforcement issue, or a social services issue, or a treatment issue. It’s a community issue. We all have to address it,” he says.
While Farmer says that disclosure forms for buying and selling a home are adequate for covering houses with meth labs and protecting clients, Realtors can also access the Meth Task Force’s Web site, which provides a method to search for all the seized meth labs in the state, a tool for reporting suspicious meth related activity 24/7, and a list of contractors that can clean a house. One of these recommended contractors is Dallas Whitmill, a senior engineer and environmental department manager for Terracon.
Whitmill says meth-contaminated houses are most often identified with a law enforcement bust, but on occasion someone may suspect a house could be contaminated and request it be tested. In this case, the laboratory analytical results determine if it is contaminated.
In Tennessee, the cleaning process depends on the tier level assigned to the meth lab by law enforcement officers, or the anticipated use, he says. There are four tier levels ranging from a structure that only precursor chemicals have been made in, as a tier I, to a super lab that has made very large quantities of meth made over an extended period of time, as a tier IV. Farmer says entering a meth house for a limited time may not cause significant health problems, but chronic exposure is where issues lie. Several hazardous chemicals used in the production of meth include volatile organic compounds, such as gasoline or Coleman fuel, strong acids and bases such as lye, reactive metals such as lithium, pressurized chemicals such as anhydrous ammonia, and the methamphetamine itself can cause problems, Whitmill says. Additionally, many meth houses can have hazards such as used needles or booby traps set by the former occupant.
“Exposure to these hazards can result in burns from fires, explosions, or chemicals; lack of coordination; and other health effects such as chest pain, headaches, dizziness, nausea, or nose, throat, eye or skin irritation,” Whitmill says. Chronic hazards include liver and kidney damage, neurological problems, and increased risk of cancer. The only way to ensure that Realtors are providing a level of protection in homes like these is to have the home properly sampled to determine if meth is present, Whitmill says.
“Many people have historically thought that if the home has not been used for the production of methamphetamine then there is not a problem; however, the EPA has determined that a home can become contaminated above concentrations deemed to be acceptable by simply smoking meth in the home,” he says.
Realtors should contact a reputable State approved contractor to remediate the home per state of Tennessee and EPA rules, regulations, and recommendations. Whitmill says only a small portion of the meth labs out there are discovered, and of the ones discovered and quarantined, only a portion of them are remediated due to a lack of funding. This is illustrated by how long many homes have been quarantined, as shown on the State of Tennessee Registry. The number of meth labs is on the rise as well, he says.
“If I were buying a house that I did not know for certain had not been used for the production and/or use of methamphetamine I would have it tested,” Whitmill says. “When you look at the potential health effects to you and your family and the level of financial investment for purchasing a house, it only makes sense to test it first.”