"If I would have had any idea, he wouldn't have been here," Simpson said.
Some people cook meth in one-pot mobile labs, in car trunks, on the side of roads, or -- as in an Elkhart case earlier this fall -- in a backpack in the middle of a busy park, yards away from kids watching a baseball game and others rolling down ramps in the skate park.
Still others mix the solvents, acids, bases and ammonia in their kitchen sinks or bathtubs. Unsuspecting homeowners and landlords are left to foot the bill when their trusted tenants and family members cook volatile meth components.
Simpson isn't done cleaning up other people's meth mistakes. Another meth lab sits untouched in her garage. Her 54-year-old son had been cooking meth in a 28-foot house boat there. Simpson had no clue until police knocked on her door last December, saying they had a lead on a meth lab there and asking if they could search the boat.
Simpson hopes to save the boat with thorough cleaning.
"I can't afford to hire it out," she said. "If I have to go through it 20 times, I'll have to do it myself."
THE PROCEDURE
When local police find what they believe is a meth lab, they call the Indiana State Police's clandestine lab team to remove the chemicals, which they usually find in a jar or bottle. The county health department posts the property unfit for human habitation and gives the homeowner a list of qualified inspectors. The homeowner does not have a time limit in which they must clean the property, but it must pass testing with minimal residue before people can live there again. Exposure to meth making chemicals can cause resipratory problems, dizziness, headaches, confusion and nausea, according to officials with the Elkhart County Health Department.
In Elkhart County, 35 buildings that formerly contained meth labs still have not been cleaned and deemed fit for occupation, according to records kept by the Elkhart County Health Department and obtained by The Elkhart Truth. The Indiana Department of Environmental Management mandated counties start monitoring meth lab sites in 2007. Of those sites in Elkhart County that hven't been cleaned, 33 were houses or apartments. One was an empty commercial building. One was a car repair shop that's been out of business since the bust there in 2008.
Since 2007, 40 sites -- mostly houses -- that formerly contained meth labs have been cleaned by homeowners, including Simpson's land.
"We were responsible, you know, my land," Simpson said. "We were responsible for getting it cleaned up. Between my son and me it was $5,000 or $6,000 to get it cleaned up. That's why I'm kind of taking my time on the second one. Money only goes so far. I'm on a fixed income."
Once a health department employee notifies the homeowner of the meth lab, the health department has no further means of enforcement, according to Tara Still, an environmentalist with the health department.
"It's up to the property owner on how quickly or how slowly or if anything gets done at all," Still said. "The property can sit vacant indefinitely."
And they do, especially if the property owner doesn't have the $10,000 to $30,000 it takes to clean a house, as estimated by the health department.
Inside one south Main Street property in Elkhart, you can see a moldy jar of food through an upstairs window. Nothing has changed since the April 2007 meth bust there. In all, 12 Elkhart County properties that contained meth labs have sat vacant for at least a year.
THAT METH-HEAD GRIME
Cleaning these properties involves more than a bucket of suds. Clothing, bedding, dishes, appliances, couches, mattresses and the carpet and padding must be thrown away.
"The problem is, during the cooking process, all of these chemicals are gassed off," said Still, the environmentalist with the health department. "They soak into every pourus material, and settle onto everything in the structure."
Every surface in the house must be cleaned. Walls should be washed three times, using a clean bucket and a rinse bucket each time. The house's HVAC and septic systems must be cleaned. Once everything has been scrubbed, the house must pass testing from an IDEM inspector. In order to pass, no more than .5 micrograms per square centimeter of meth can be found on walls.
"It's not something you can see or smell, so you just have to be diligent," Still said. "People misjudge how much physical effort it takes."
GUTTING IT OUT
IDEM lists 39 people as contracted inspectors. Five of them are based in Elkhart County. Homeowners can hire some inspectors to clean their houses, but not all. Inspectors charge anywhere from $1,000 to $2,000 to test a home for meth remnants, which includes lab costs, said Steve Mojonnier, senior environmental manager with IDEM.
Homeowners have one more option besides washing homes thoroughly or leaving the property to sit and deteriorate. They can tear out the home's interior, leaving the bare structure, and can rebuild from there.
"Some people who don't want their property out of commission for a long time have just found that it can be cheaper and quicker to get it done that way," Mojonnier said. "That depends on what resources are available to them."
However, if a property owner does not have the money to pay someone to clean the property or doesn't have the time to do it themselves, they may not have any way of dealing with the defunct meth lab.
"Money is kind of at the root of all of these problems," Mojonnier said.
Marlowe Yoder has spent two months, $7,000 of homeowners' insurance money and $3,000 of his own money tearing out cabinets and flooring and spraying down walls in a Goshen apartment he rented to someone who turned out to be a meth addict.
In the 10 years Yoder has rented out properties, this is the first time a tenant has been caught with meth.
"I figured it could happen to me," he said. "Everybody thinks that and hopes it doesn't. It's just one of those things. What do you do?"
From the ground, he couldn't tell his upstairs tenant had put up an extra door to divide the kitchen from the rest of the apartment and had set up a separate ventillation system near the windows.
Police discovered those modifications, along with meth precursors and a one-pot meth lab when they responded to a domestic dispute there in July.
But now it's Yoder's task to make the apartment safe again.
"I wish there were more dire consequences for the people that do this," Yoder said. "For what it costs a housing provider, it's phenomenal."