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I'm fairly sure you did not work with the chemicals you were using in the same unsafe manner that cookers do in a meth lab. You were probably in a laboratory with soapstone horizontal surfaces and some sort of local ventilation.
Certainly but that does not mean I was not exposed to chemicals or never had problems with them. Had my share of fires and explosions and causing building evacuations.
As said elsewhere, toxicity is dose related. None of the meth chemicals appear particularly toxic.
I've become a fan of the Breaking Bad series where a chemistry teacher goes into the meth business. He does everything safely.
wrote in message news: snipped-for-privacy@4ax.com...
I would not invest in this property unless you know how extensive the contamination is.
The standards for cleanup are nothing like what would be required if the meth were legally made in a laboratory. The problem you will be facing is that the cookers were not concerned with confining their cook to one area of the house. Waste products and spilled raw materials may be in all the rooms. By "in all the rooms" I mean possibly spilled on the floors. A house is filled with porous surfaces so a simple wipe down is not going to do it. The various chemicals and solvents may have been absorbed into wood or fiber (think drapes and carpeting) and may have become trapped in dead spaces in the ventilation system and plumbing. Vapors could have traveled up to the attic where they will slowly be released over time. I won't even discuss what may have been poured into the soil around the house. Unless every, and I do mean every, part of the house is scrubbed and treated with a kill solution, you will never be sure that you have removed or destroyed any residual raw materials including solvents, intermediates, or the meth itself. If the contamination was localized to just one part of the house, you MIGHT be able to have it decontaminated and sealed for less than it takes to turn a profit upon flipping the house. Please keep in mind that even after decontamination, which MUST be proven by proper testing, you may still need to seal or encapsulate various parts of the structure. If this doesn't work, that part of the structure must be removed and replaced. It is equivalent to what is done in soil remediation. The soil is removed and new fresh soil is used as the replacement.
Good Luck.
Well, sort of....several sites suggest first contacting police to get a report of the conditions in the structure. They should have a handle on how long it operated, and when labs are discovered it is a big fat deal to get it closed, the chemicals disposed of, etc. I am certainly not highly interested in buying a meth lab, but if the owner had a renter that operated there a week or two, I'd be much more interested than if it was a cabin in the boonies cooking meth for months or years. Also of interest is the condition of the structure and how much the chems might permeate. State regs here are very exact on sampling surfaces before and after cleanup. There are industries in the area (do you know YOUR neighborhood?) that pump out thousands of tons of chemicals that I breathe every day, not to mention the neighbor's fireplace :o)
and what kind of battery does your laptop use?
well wear protective clothing, gut all the walls cielings etc.... remove everything to the sub floor, wash down all surfaces with kilz or bin, then begin rebuild.
if your a smoker just do all of this without protection since you dont care about your health and tobacco is one of the most lethal substances know to man.......
I don't know that storing your profits in a $40/month storage locker is "safe."
When Walt's wife showed him the stack of money, he asked. "How much is here?" to which she replied: "I have no earthly idea."
I've fiddled with computing how much was there. First, I have to compute how many individual bills could be stacked in a pile six feet wide, four feet deep, and four feet high. Here's what I've got so far:
Each bill is about 6x2 inches. The pile, then, works out to be 12 bills wide and 24 bills deep. Hence one "layer" contains 288 bills.
Assuming a ream of 24# paper is 3" thick, a stack 4 foot high would yield 16 reams or 8,000 bills high. Eight thousand layers times 288 bills per layer equals 2,304,000 individual bills. So, at a minimum, assuming all the bills were one dollar bills, the stack would amount to over $2 million. If each bill had a denomination of $100, the White family is sitting on $200 million bucks, all in a neat pile in a storage locker.
There is more than one way to cook meth, but if you see or smell these chemicals together, they might indicate a meth lab.
-acetone
-isopropyl alcohol (rubbing alcohol or Iso-Heet fuel treatment)
-methyl alcohol (wood spirits or Heet fuel treatment)
-lye as in Red Devil lye
-crystal or liquid iodine
-mineral spirits
-bleach
-anhydrous ammonia
-sulfuric acid (car battery acid)
-hydrochloric acid (muriatic acid)
-matches/match box strikers (for red phosphorus)
-cold tablets containing ephedrine or pseudoephedrine
-white gas
-lithium (from lithium batteries)
-trichloroethane (solvent for gun cleaning)
-sodium metal or rock or table salt
-ether (starter fluid)
-toluene
Thank you for excellent list.
We live in a very rural area of sparse residential housing. In other words, no farming and no livestock. It's just that sometimes throughout our valley I smell a 'sour milk' smell hanging in the air. Only twice within a year, but little wind, so couldn't tell direction, just a 'wet' sour milk odor.
Not having taken part in the drug era, I didn't know. ...maybe it's something else.
All of these will REQUIRE purchase with photo ID soon, the sudafed already does
But it wasn't Walter that did that. It was his WIFE. I guess you could say that giving all those millions to your wife and not supervising is equally unsafe. For those that didn't see it, she had a skid size pile of cash in one of those pay storage locker places, easily tens of millions. And it was just covered with a tarp, to boot.
You would think first rulse would be to at least hide it in boxes that look like clothing or household stuff, and to spread it out over many locations, not one big pile. If someone stumbled on it, there goes all your $$$.
I don't remember the exact number, but I think they had enough of the principle chemical to make $300mil worth of meth. I don't know how much he had gone through, but that pile could be in your range.
Besides the cleanup issue, there is the issue of what you have to disclose to buyers when you go to flip it. Like, if it's been cleaned up to all state regulations, procedures, etc, do you then still have to disclose to buyers that it was a meth lab? My guess would be that there might be laws specific to the state that might address that issue and that absent that, it's still to me of such major significance that I think you should disclose it. I could think of hypothetical cases where even if it's not required, if you didn't dsiclose and something were missed in the cleanup, it could come back to bite you.
And then having disclosed it, the next question is how do you figure what impact that is going to have on the price? I'm not particularly afraid of chemicals, but if there are similar houses selling for X, this one would have to be at a substantial discount to interest me. So, you have multiple unknowns. How much it will cost to clean it up and what the house will later sell for. I would not get involved in this unless there was plenty of margin to cover all the above.
You are correct. Acute toxicity is dose related. Chronic toxicity is also dose related but requires much lower exposure levels. I would be concerned with chronic exposure. Your own experience, while valid, is just a single data point. It is anecdotal experience.
As for meth chemicals not being particularly toxic, it all depends on what synthesis and conditions are being used. Off the top of my head, the more common clandestine approaches use halogenated hydrocarbons and anhydrous ammonia. I classify these as toxic, the ammonia acutely so.
I too am a fan of Breaking Bad. I would not hold up the lead character, Walter White, as a typical meth cooker. Jessie is closer to reality. I also disagree with your assessment that Walt does everything safely. He does things in a way that minimizes the risk to himself, not to the surroundings. His waste is obviously mislabeled and there is no reason for him to minimize the release of vapors.
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If I did decide to purchase, I would be most interested (at the outset) in learning the conditions found when the cops went in...there is a whole special task force dealing with disposal. Considering the state statutes, the residue before and after cleanup would be next. I am not by any means leaning toward this property, but without the meth lab problem, it would be an ideal cheap property to remodel extensively (good bones, good stable neighborhood, increasing prop. values; properties are moving here). That said, it had never before occurred to me that a home might have once been contaminated with drugs.
I've read various descriptions of the meth lab odor, and cat urine is mentioned....a former neighbor who had extensive knowledge (and who is probably dead) said it was just a sickening sweet smell. I've had neighbors who dealt in coke, one of whom died at a young age of heart attack, and now I wonder what the danger of coke residue is. Come to think of it, mebbe that has something to do with the "autism epidemic". I put that in quotes because I expect that autism is pretty badly overdiagnosed for access to social services. Coke probably vastly more pervasive than meth until fairly recently.
Good grief. Trying to link coke residue with autism? Coke and meth are two very different things. Cocaine is imported as such, already processed, not made in a lab here. The processing lab is typically in South America. You hear about meth lab operations being busted all the time. I've never heard of a similar coke lab being busted in the USA.
And if there were an association between cocaine and autism, then one would expect the huge increase in numbers to be centered around populations where cocaine usage is highest. Instead it seems to be distributed everywhere.
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Good grief is right :o) For the record, I didn't have coke mfg. in mind; it was the end product which allegedly contaminates most of the currency in the US (and what else?).
Where is cocaine usage highest? Isolated there? How many college age and older have never tried the stuff or come in contact with faint residues?
After all the hysteria trying to link vaccines with autism, coke seemed a slightly more logical suspect :o) I once had a neighbor with two severly autistic children....they were wild! The rate of autism diagnosis nowadays is about 1%....an epidemic like that should be getting a lot more scientific study! Jeez!
The problems are the CONCENTRATIONS of the common chemicals "in use every day" as everyday chemicals can be quite dangerous when used in high concentrations...
I'm a little more involved in toxicology experience and my personal experience is a lot more than anecdotal.
What you say is true about chronic toxicity but it is also dose related. Smokers for example have maybe 5% of their hemoglobin tied up by carbon monoxide but it will not kill them.
Walt does protect himself as well as the interior of the home he uses. I suspect fumes are not that bad or they would be reported as released in a populated neighborhood. Where I worked it was amazing that we did not get a lot of complaints. We put one hell of a lot of toxic fumes up fume hoods. I could tell some horror stories but I won't.
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Ah...fond memories of high-school chem (my favorite class). After an especially thorough lecture about the dangers of releasing bromine gas, we went on to do our experiment. Don't remember what we mixed, but as was certifiably predictable, one class-mate didn't have his flask sealed up and we had clouds of brown gas floating about the room. Another time, probably a precursor of my adult cooking skill, we mixed (sulfuric?) acid with carbon, probably sugar. Heat to boiling. Stir. Fill out the workbook page and turn in at end of class. Only thing on my workbook page after the experiment (aside from black glop splattered all over it) were the words "I'm sorry. My experiment exploded all over my workbook."
My grandson is taking advanced microbiology in HS. Students went around school and took cultures from anything they wanted, then made agar and grew the samples taken. Teacher got all serious about one sampling taken from a drinking fountain...don't know what it was.
the future owners or tenents. Our economy if full of companies making money, by using unsafe, or unproven, yet epa approved, chemicals, and technologies. Just start reading MSDS(material Safety Data Sheets) just because everyone uses paint, and people aren't being carted off to the hospital in droves the day after they paint, doesn't mean we aren't already being carted off in droves with all kinds of cancers, and unheard of diseases.
the Master. but I do think there is a lot more to the unseen world of chemicals that only a small percentage of people know. We can only google and piece together, and then decide whatever we want to do, based on our preconceived notions, and financial situations. Personally, I would say do, about 10 times the research you think you should do. the general public, and even police officers aren't normally qualified to give you the kind of answers you want. Do you trust a energetic first responder to do open heart surgery in a pinch? Find someone who is qualified. We all like to save money, and there are sharks in suits out there. But a $2 tube of caulk is a $2 tube of caulk and a $4 tube of caulk is a $4 tube of caulk. Just about every tube of caulk I have bought on sale has failed within 6 months. You can get a good deal, through negotiation, that is great.But the quick road to success as we americans wan t it, leads to failure. There is something wonderful that happens to a person as they persevere, try, fall, get up and keep getting up.
things back to because it's one of my soap boxes.
specific zero-voc tints. Normal tint, in zero- voc paint is.........
have been having a tremendous difficulty getting the msds sheets on their TINT.
in homes and businesses, with our family's health at risk?
prosperous, blessed week.
Most paint studies are either epidemiological study of painters or residual chemicals shortly after painting.
I recall one done on vinyl acetate resin based paint as there was residual monomer in the canned paint and vinyl acetate hydrolyzes to acetic acid and acetaldehyde the latter which is carcinogenic. As I recall, while there was acetaldehyde in the original paint it was absent after the can was opened and none evolved from the painted rooms. I think they measured for about two weeks after painting and there were volatiles like acetic acid decreasing with time.
Point is, there have been lots of toxicity studies on paint and similarly for other stuff in a house like foamed insulation and carpeting both of which can give off nasties too.
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