Monterey County Weekly Newspaper article published June 22, 2022.
Link to Monterey County Weekly article
Reprinted from original article…
…A Pacific Grove man leads the way in making sure illegal – and toxic – drug labs get cleaned up.
Big drug busts of methamphetamine and opioid labs make for splashy, attention-grabbing headlines, but what happens to those labs after law enforcement leaves and the attention wanes? What becomes of the rented hotel rooms, apartments and homes commandeered by illicit drug makers? What is left behind and who cleans it up?
Michael Polkabla of Pacific Grove, knows the answers. He’s been inside labs after the fact, but not without first donning a head-to-toe “bunny suit,” or personal protective equipment, gloves and a respirator mask with eye protection. As a certified industrial hygienist he knows how dangerous meth and opioids, such as fentanyl and the even more lethal carfentanil, can be. And from his 30 years of assessing toxic waste situations through his company BioMax Environmental Inc., he also knows where to look: the powders left behind stick to high touch areas, rest on ceiling fan blades and tops of door trim, permeate carpets and settle into every nook and cranny.
What Polkabla found in those abandoned labs disturbed him. He couldn’t stop thinking about who might unknowingly come into contact with the dangerous residues – property owners, cleaners, future renters. The thought of a child crawling on carpet infused with a dangerous drug haunted him. After one bust in an apartment at a San Mateo complex in 2018, remnants of fentanyl and carfentanil were discovered inside other tenants’ mailboxes because the pill-maker was receiving drugs through the mail from China.
It started back in the early 2000s, when meth “reared its ugly head. The illicit drug trade found a niche here in California,” Polkabla says. “My profession recognized methamphetamine was very toxic and presented hazards presented with exposures. We didn’t know how that translated into what was left behind.” Small drug labs popped up that were later “upsized” by organized crime groups: “The health departments and law enforcement didn’t know how to deal with it.”
There were no laws on the books about the problem and it was a new field of industrial hygiene that few in the industry were willing to jump into. Polkabla did jump in, both as a contractor who assesses toxic sites, and out of concern for public safety.
“I got into it because nobody else wanted to do it. It was new, it was hard, there wasn’t a pathway that was ‘oh this is how you do it.’ It wasn’t cookbook at that time,” he says. “We were figuring out how best to protect the public and law enforcement, to protect the communities based on this new crisis we were facing. And it’s only gotten worse since then.”
Polkabla helped lawmakers craft the California Methamphetamine Contaminated Property Cleanup Act of 2005, requiring health departments to mandate assessments and cleanups. After it went into effect on Jan. 1, 2006, he volunteered with the Department of Toxic Substances Control to travel around the state educating health departments about how the law works.
As the fentanyl crisis grew in recent years Polkabla noticed a new problem: Despite fentanyl’s deadly streak – earlier this year the Centers for Disease Control declared it the leading cause of death among 18 – to 45-year-olds – health departments weren’t requiring cleanups because it wasn’t specifically mentioned in the law. He and others worked to successfully amend the act in 2019 to add fentanyl. It took effect on Jan. 1, 2020. Unfortunately, he says, health departments haven’t quite caught onto the change yet.
Although Polkabla is focused on increasing public awareness about fentanyl, he hasn’t forgotten about meth. For the last few years he’s been conducting research while traveling around the state speaking at conferences, teaching and as a contractor. He swabs every hotel room he stays in. The hotels are nice ones, he says. So far 100 percent of rooms have contained some level of meth residue, some that exceed the levels required for cleanup under the law. He plans on getting colleagues to join in on the research and publish their data.
Polkabla doesn’t get too stressed about staying in the hotel rooms but, he says, “I do
Article author…
Pam Marino joined the Monterey County Weekly in November 2016. She covers Carmel, Pacific Grove, Del Rey Oaks, Monterey, and Pebble Beach . She also covers tourism, health, housing and homelessness, business, military and higher education.
