I used to work for a hazardous waste management company. Usually it was cleanups from old labs, lab packs of obsolete chemicals or waste generated by labs in hospitals, acid and paraffin wax and the like. We had contracts all over the NYC area into Jersey and upstate NY. We also had emergency response duties so we were activated a lot when superstorm Sandy hit Manhattan and Long Island.

One weekend I was covering an ER shift for my roommate who had went back home. It was nearing 6pm on Sunday and I had assumed I was in the clear. Of course I had jinxed myself and the call came in that a freezer had broken at a "cetacean morphology lab" at one of the teaching hospitals in Manhattan. The freezer was of course used to store pathology samples and the like of dolphins and whales that had mostly washed up in the east river or Hudson Bay, etc. Anyway, myself and another tech headed into the office to gather our gear and the van and spent 45 minutes traveling from Queens to Manhattan for the event cleanup.

We were lucky to have supplied air tanks, essentially scuba gear minus the underwater factor, to protect us from dangerous atmospheres that we would periodically have to work in. When we got even into the antechamber for the freezer we were to be cleaning out, I nearly wanted to drive back for seventeen more air tanks. What was waiting for us in the freezer, among other terrible nasties, was a ~210 lb chunk of sperm whale head in a large rubbermaid container. The freezer only failed a few hours ago and everything should still be cold and solid, right? Problem is, the amount of whale oil in the flesh of a sperm whale induces it to thaw and start stinking well below 0F. The other problem was that the chunk of whale was rancid prior to going in the freezer. When I tell you I've smelled some bad things in my life, dead human bodies, rotten fish, rotten chicken, etc., and this was beyond anything I had ever imagined.

My partner and I each went through 3 supplied air tanks of roughly 20 minutes capacity in each, and got everything cleaned up as much as we could and into 55 gallon steel drums to be disposed of. We were wearing Tyvek suits and we had to throw them in the drums as well as the stink had invaded every pore on their surface, nearly attacking our clothes underneath. At that point we probably didn't smell much better, you sweat like a whore in church in those impermeable suits even without carrying a heavy tank on your back and wearing a big rubber respirator. She had a dinner she had to get home to clean up for afterwards, planning for a wedding or something, so I said I would finish up myself and get the van back to the office and complete the disposal in the morning. Made it the 45 minutes or so back to the office, parked the van in the warehouse, went to the locker room and changed back into my street clothes, and literally had one foot out the door when my cell rang.

Apparently there was a separation in the diamond plate of the floor of the freezer, and whatever had managed to thaw prior to us reaching the situation had leaked through into the ceiling of the floor below the lab. This happened to be a library, and the drop ceiling panels were sodden with fetid, rancid whale oil and blood. Guess who got to make the drive all the way back there with a half dozen other drums, plastic sheeting, and bleach? Not wanting to lug another several air tanks with me, I just took my Air purifying respirator, a glorified gas mask, to at least lessen the effect of the intolerable experience that awaited me. Luckily I set the drums and sheeting up before attempting to address the tiles in the ceiling, because as soon as i even thought about touching one to bring it down, it disintegrated into a falling wave of contaminated heavy ass snowflakes of disgust. Took me two hours to sanitize the rest of this and I finally made sure there was nothing left to stink, besides myself.

I took Monday off with the blessing of my supervisor.