Crime scene cleaner reveals eye-watering amount he earned from a single job
Kit Roberts
Featured Image Credit: YouTube/LADbible Stories
Warning: This article contains discussion of topics which some readers may find distressing.
A man who cleans crime scenes has shared the enormous amount he was paid for doing just one job.
Ben Giles has one of the most unpleasant jobs that you could think of - a biohazard cleaner.
Many of us might have let our houses go a little bit, with dishes piling up in the sink, the rubbish needing to be taken out - this is not what Ben deals with.
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If you need to call Ben in, it means that there is something which is actively dangerous or extremely unpleasant which needs removing before a location can be safe again, including extreme hoarding, decomposing animals, human excrement, and human remains.
Ben is from the UK, and started out as a window cleaner, but said he wanted to find a specialism so he could earn 'more than a living', and reasoned that the worse the thing he was cleaning 'the more I could be paid'.
His work often involves dealing with the aftermath of a violent crime, including where someone has been killed.
Once the police have taken all the evidence they need from a scene, Ben and his team will set to work making the space safe to enter without protective equipment.
But one job took things to truly mammoth proportions, bigger than a mammoth actually, because it involved a whale which had became lodged on the bow of a ship.
"One of the biggest paydays for me was New Year's Eve where my phone went off and ended up taking the call and it was a whale bizarrely that was hanging over the bow of a ship that was coming into Portsmouth Harbour," Ben told LADBible Stories.
This was a 17-metre-long Fin Whale, the second largest species of whale, with only Blue Whales growing bigger.
Sadly, whales are frequently injured and killed when they are hit by ships, called a 'ship strike'.
"I just thought, who on earth is gonna deal with a 22 tonne fin whale on New Year's Eve and Portsmouth Harbour? So what could we charge for it?" said Ben.
In the end, Ben and his team were paid £17,000 to remove the whale from the ship and safely dispose of it, a lot of money for one day's work.
"We ended up sending a team down, having to winch this whale with cranes that were on the harbour side in Portsmouth onto the side of the harbour, cut the whale in half and then put it into two bathtub lorries and take that away to be rendered," he said.
Ben explained that this is a particularly big payday, and that his team typically charges between £500 and £2,000, though he added that they have to put caveats in in case something else comes up during the course of the job.
He explained: "When we are cleaning a floor where someone's died, we might lift that floor and then suddenly they're saturated into the floorboards and then we've gotta cut the floorboards out and then it might have gone through that to the ceiling below, and then we've gotta go into the apartment below and take the ceiling out or clean that.
"And so it just depends. It kind of depends on how bad it gets."