For one Trussville-based company, business has been booming since COVID-19 arrived in Alabama.

Before the outbreak, Alabama Bio-Clean received between five and seven phone inquiries a day requesting its biohazard and crisis cleanup services, according to founder and owner Stuart Frandsen. In recent weeks, the company has fielded 20 to 30 such calls per day for coronavirus-related jobs alone, as businesses, individuals and governmental agencies across the state have turned to the outfit and others like it for protection from infection.

"We've been very busy," he said.

'Peace of mind'

On Thursday morning, Frandsen and several employees brought their services to the Vestavia Hills Jail after officers there learned that an inmate may have been infected with COVID-19.

The job was a multi-step process. First, police moved all inmates out of the part of the jail where the potentially infectious inmate had been housed.

Then Frandsen and three other Alabama Bio-Clean technicians arrived and donned gowns, nitrile gloves, and half-face masks with P100 and multi-gas cartridges. In areas of the jail where the potentially infectious inmate did not spend time, they scrubbed every surface and item by hand and allowed them to dry before applying a hospital-grade disinfectant.

A fifth technician, Max Krutchen, wore what's known as Level C personal protective equipment to achieve a higher level of protection as he cleaned the isolation cell where the inmate had been locked up. He used a specialized cleaning system to disinfect the space, out of an abundance of caution and to be absolutely sure that every trace of the virus was fully eradicated. By noon, one Alabama Bio-Clean employee remarked that at that moment the jail was one of the cleanest places in the state.

"Knowing that it's been sanitized can give people peace of mind when they go back into a building, even if they haven't had a confirmed case," said Ellen Posey, a biohazard technician with the firm and former Birmingham police officer.

But that's just one type of service the company offers during the pandemic.

The firm also cleans homes where people have died of coronavirus. COVID-19 deaths can require extra precautions, including fogging homes with disinfectant and safely removing contaminated air by putting them on what's known as negative air containment before entering.

Filling a need

Frandsen, 32, got his start in the business of cleaning up serious messes during his senior year at Eustis High School in central Florida in 2005, when he took a job at a restoration company that specializes in helping people recover from fire, water and mold damage.

While earning his degree at the University of Alabama at Birmingham, he started Alabama Bio-Clean in 2011 after realizing that there was a need for people to do the type of dirty work that is now his specialty. That includes sanitizing the gory scenes of violent deaths, suicides and accidents, and ensuring all infectious fluids and materials have been properly cleaned up, packaged and disposed.

The firm also handles other sorts of jobs, like cleaning and sanitizing the homes of severe hoarders who fail to dispose of large numbers of sanitary products and people whose homes are overrun by dozens of pets.

It's a grisly profession, but Frandsen says it's a calling, as it requires a level of compassion and people skills that many less-specialized companies don't provide.

"I cut my teeth doing the labor at a restoration company, as well as a funeral home, and what I realized was there's always a need for people that can not only do this work and do it well, but also there's a certain level of service and a level of care that needs to be provided to families and people who are dealing with a crime scene," he said.

"It's not just, like, a fire or water damage situation. You're dealing with people on the worst days of their lives, so it takes a special person."

Threat planning

The coronavirus pandemic has made biohazard cleanup more essential than ever.

Frandsen said his company was ready to respond to the outbreak because he keeps a close eye on communicable diseases around the world by following international news and reading publications like the Journal of Infectious Diseases. As vice president of the American Biorecovery Association, a national industry group, he remains in close contact with other people in the biohazard abatement field, as well as public health professionals, epidemiologists and other experts.

So when he first started seeing reports from China about a deadly novel coronavirus late last year, he moved quickly to prepare. He hired extra staff in December and January and got them trained as technicians. And in December he decided to extend the firm's stockpile of personal protective equipment and disinfectants from the usual six-month-to-one-year supply to a 16-month supply.

"Being biohazard recovery, I think it's very important to be on the forefront of anything like this," Posey said. "We take much more precautions: suiting up more and we did a lot of in-house trainings about this."

That foresight and planning has paid off, said Frandsen, as Alabama Bio-Clean has been able to respond swiftly to the vast majority of calls it has received in recent weeks.

Sometimes the company has to do a version of triage – as in when a public utility, law enforcement agency or essential business requires immediate service, temporarily bumping other jobs – but Frandsen says it has handled the outbreak well.

“That’s our whole business. We’ve got to be aware of the health threats that are out there so we’re prepared to help our customers,” Frandsen explained. “Around December, we made a decision to get a bunch of supplies – more on hand than usual. We knew the potential impact was going to be pretty great.”