It’s a dirty job – but someone has to dump ourselves when we fall dead.
The trauma unit has come clean about the horrific work that goes into picking up the decomposing bodies of people after they die. Videos that have gone viral now detailing the Australian crew’s horrific – but necessary – mission are currently racking up millions of views on TikTok. [Warning: Viewer discretion advised.]
“It’s not the kind of work you advertise – but regardless of people needing to know what you’re doing because it’s really prevalent,” custodian Dan Hood, 34, said of his bloody ceremony. “We only step in when things get too drastic.”
Point-blank: “When the body dies, it leaks out,” Hood told Kennedy News. “Organs liquefy and turn black. The fluid that comes out is basically decomposition of decomposing tissue that is leaking out of the body.”
He and his father, Ashley, 65, run Perth-based Trauma Clean Australia, which disposes of the deadliest post-mortem clutter — as well as methamphetamine labs, feces and other horrific debris — often with the goal of making homes suitable for resale.
One recent cleanup involved a middle-aged woman from Perth who died on her sofa of natural causes: “This particular body had been there for about a week,” Hood soberly explained while pulling the curtain on the cleanup of the corpse. “Heat speeds things up.”
He added: “Above where we are in Perth it is very, very hot. The weather was hot and the rate of decomposition was faster in the summer than in the winter.”
An accompanying video, which has garnered more than 7 million views, shows the leather sofa covered in the deceased’s blood, body fluids and hair as a scene from the movie “Seven”. The woman’s plasma even collected on the ground and attracted hordes of insects.
“Insect activity could have occurred and the insects would have moved to different parts of the house,” Hood said. “They carry with them that smell and decomposition.”
This is where the father-son cleaning team “comes” and tries to make these bloody scenes look so pure that it seems as if “nothing happened there”.
“We clean homes and hit the reset button to get them to a state where others do business [workers] Hood, who wears a full PPE suit to the party, said. “A lot of deals won’t get involved when there’s a lot of biohazards in the house, so we’re taking care of it.”
The first part of the process involves checking all the different materials in the house because “the decomposition is going to go into everything porous,” according to Hood.
Then, family therapists remove every single piece of clothing, carpets, upholstery and drapes to make sure no trace of the body is left, Kennedy News reported. Even the floors have to come off because fluids seep into the wood.
Accompanying footage shows the team clearing a blood-soaked floor, suggesting a bloody mix of “CSI” meets “Extreme Makeover.”
“It is possible that we will have to pierce the concrete with the concrete and get it out,” Hood said. “Walls should be washed with chemicals even if they are not physically touched by anything. You want to clean and disinfect the entire area, regardless of whether you see anything.”
Getting rid of debris requires more than a trip to the town dump: Trauma Clean must move all the biological waste to different places to incinerate.
“It’s a huge operation,” Hood said of the R-rated regeneration process, which, in the case of the deceased woman mentioned above, took about two to three weeks. He added, “It’s hard to set aside a specific time at work because you want to leave the house sitting until you know you’ve really processed the smell.”
Damage control isn’t just physical. “While you are providing the service, you have to deal with the customer in the most sensitive way,” Hood said. “You’re walking into a situation where someone doesn’t know how to move forward.”
he added, “[We have] To be able to just assure them that we can handle everything from start to finish and the next time they come in, they won’t even know that anything happened there.”
Hood said the task can be particularly challenging because some “people refuse to go back to it,” while others believe there might be something supernatural there.
Needless to say, the online Peanut Show was shocked and shocked by the behind-the-scenes infographic.
“Oh my..their hair is stuck on the couch,” one dreaded clumsy yelled, while another wrote that the clip, “just put my anxiety in the ceiling.”
Meanwhile, one TikTok user joked, “Are they selling couch. Spoiling mines.”
One potential customer even dreadfully requested Trauma Clean services, writing, “Can I get a quote from you guys. I might need a cleaning similar to that being done in the next week or so?”
In an equally bloody educational show close to home, cleaning companies in New York and New Jersey reveal the dirty details behind cleaning after murders, suicides, and other horrific incidents.
“Gun [suicide] Andrew Daniellak, owner of a crime scene cleaning franchise Spaulding Deacon in northern New Jersey, told The Post. Daniellake recalls an incident just before Christmas when an elderly parent’s 30-year-old son shot himself in the basement of their home. As usual, a crew of crime scene cleaners arrived in hazmat equipment and used special cleaning products.
“We had to pick up a piece of the individual’s head and bone fragments from behind a storage box,” he recalls. “The floor was concrete. We cleaned, sanded, and sealed it so smells and stains remain inside. A HEPA air purifier vents everything and filters the room.”