Warning: This article contains discussion of topics which some readers may find distressing.
A crime scene cleaner has revealed the huge fee he received for a single, extraordinary call-out.
Ben Giles works in one of the grimmest corners of professional cleaning: biohazard remediation.
While plenty of people might fall behind on everyday chores — a few unwashed plates, an overstuffed bin — that’s a world away from the environments Ben is brought in to handle.
Being asked to attend a property usually means there’s an immediate health risk or something so severe it must be removed before the area can be considered safe again. That can include extreme hoarding situations, decomposing animals, human waste, and even human remains.
Based in the UK, Ben has said he began as a window cleaner, but wanted a niche that would let him earn “more than a living.” His thinking was straightforward: the more unpleasant the job, “the more I could be paid.”
Much of his work involves making locations safe after serious incidents, including violent crimes and scenes where someone has died.
After investigators have finished collecting evidence and the site is released, Ben and his team move in to decontaminate the space so it can be entered without specialist protective gear.
One particular job, however, dwarfed the usual call-outs — and not just figuratively. It involved a whale that became stuck across the front 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.
The animal was a 17-metre fin whale — the second-largest whale species, with only blue whales growing larger.
Fatal injuries to whales caused by vessels are sadly common; the incident is known as 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.
Ultimately, Ben and his team were paid £17,000 to remove the whale from the ship and dispose of it safely — an exceptionally large amount for a single 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 noted that this kind of payday is rare. More typical jobs sit in the £500 to £2,000 range, though he said quotes often have to include conditions in case the work expands once the team gets deeper into the site.
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.”