Photo by David Barer/StateImpact Texas

Kurt Flippin wears the full hazmat suit he uses while cleaning homes contaminated with methamphetamine residues. Flippin says he knows of scores of homes that are contaminated but have never been cleaned.

It was one of Kirk Flippin’s saddest cleanup jobs. He remembers standing in a driveway in Grapevine, Texas a few years back, throwing a little girl’s toys, clothes and dolls into a dumpster as she watched in dismay. “Why are all my toys in the dumpster?” the girl said to her Mom.

“Because a bad man used to live here,” her mother replied.

Flippin tossed the girl’s toys out because her family had unwittingly moved into a home previously occupied by a methamphetamine cook. The family realized something was wrong when their dog died. It was chemical poisoning, according to their veterinarian. The children became chronically ill with respiratory problems. They had their home tested for meth, but unable to foot the bill for a proper cleanup, the family was forced to move out and eventually the bank foreclosed on the home. They lost their house and most of their possessions, Flippin remembers.

Flippin is the owner of Texas Decon Environmental Services, a waste cleanup company that counts meth lab cleanup as one of its specialties. Flippin was called in by the bank to detoxify the home. The name of the bank and family are proprietary information that Flippin could not disclose.

There aren’t many meth-lab cleanup jobs in Texas for Flippin though, since there are no laws that require homeowners to clean their property after a meth lab has been broken up. In Texas, there aren’t even laws requiring landlords to disclose if an apartment was once a meth lab, according to David Leibowitz, a former Texas House Representative from San Antonio. Continue Reading →