EPA to begin cleanup at illegal Reedley bio lab
Crews will finish their work in the coming days, but the city still has to address all the medical devices left in the building.
REEDLEY, Calif. (KFSN) -- The shuttered Reedley lab buzzed with activity on Monday. Several pieces of equipment and heavy machinery arrived at the site, from generators to forklifts and trailers.
Reedley code enforcement officer Jesalyn Harper says it's all part of the federal government's effort to clean up the former lab.
"We need to get the chemicals removed from the location," Harper said. "So, the EPA will be going in and doing an assessment of the chemicals. They'll be containing them properly for transportation, and then they'll be incinerated."
It was inside those walls of the former packing house where federal prosecutors say David He, also known as Jei Bei Zhu, operated an illegal biological lab.
A simple green garden hose running out from the back of the building was one of the first things that tipped the city off to what was happening inside. When Harper went to speak with workers, they said they were making pregnancy tests.
But that is not all that was going on. The U.S. Attorney's Office says workers were making and misbranding hundreds of thousands of medical tests, like those for COVID and even HIV. They sold and sent them around the world.
"It's so wild, you can't make it up," Harper said. "You can't make it up."
When officials shut down the lab, they found human blood, urine, and nearly a thousand mice. They also found hazardous chemicals.
"These chemicals have been stored in various different means," Harper said. "I mean, we have a bleach bottle, and you open it up, and you can tell it's not bleach inside. Laundry detergent bottles, water bottles, you know we had a lot of biologicals in Gatorades."
Those chemicals are so serious that Harper says the state's environmental protection agency said the cleanup project was too costly and challenging for them.
Now, federal contractors and an Environmental Protection Agency official will be on-site to start the cleanup on Tuesday.
They will finish their work in the coming days, but the city still has to address all the medical devices left inside the building.
After that, Harper said the city would work with the property owners to address the building itself.
They will decide if they need to demolish it.
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