LOUISVILLE, Ky. — For the past week, crews have been working to dismantle the home found with hazardous materials in the Highview neighborhood.
The Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) started demolition work at the home located at 6213 Applegate Lane on Monday, Oct. 16.
Chuck Berry, an EPA on-scene coordinator, said crews started with the garage located in the back of the home, which they finished after roughly a day and a half. Since then, crews have been working on the home itself.
A Nicholasville, Kentucky company, CMS Environmental Services, is taking apart the home piece-by-piece.
The process began with crews dismantling the home's roof and walls. They are currently in the process of removing the contents from inside the home and placing them into a steel tank in the backyard to be processed, allowing for it to be safety taken off-site and to a landfill.
Louisville Metro Emergency Services (LMEMS) released a batch of drone photos Thursday that show workers removing numerous containers of chemicals and explosive materials from the home. Berry said these photos are of the garage, and that they plan on sharing more photos and videos of the home at a later date.
Jody Meiman, executive director for LMEMS, said they are air-monitoring where the waste is going throughout the community and that the process is "going very well."
Berry said they are still looking at roughly 10 more days of work, depending on the weather, before the demolition is complete.
"This is a slow process by design," he said. "If you want to demo a house you can do it in a matter of hours, we're taking weeks and that's on purpose."
Applegate Lane has been blocked off to traffic and littered with heavy machinery. To protect the neighborhood, a barricade of shipping containers surrounds the home.
Berry said they've had a few reactions go off in their reaction box, and that they had a fire in it "the other day."
"Our contingency plans in those situations have worked exactly as they were designed. The fire was immediately snuffed out. We did a stand-down, assessed the situation and decided to continue mixing operations just at a slower rate," he said. "As we go through the building we are probably going to find things that are going to react. Again, [it's a] part of the plan, part of the process."
Berry said he's expecting most of the reactions to be acid-based, which are sometimes "energetic" but not super dangerous. He added that they are constantly looking at the air-monitoring data to make sure it poses no threat to the crews or community.
"Everything is going as well as we planned, and I'm a little surprised and pleased," Berry said.
Crews are on-track to finish the demolition by the end of October.
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