Crews add techniques to confront BART grime
Sixteen custodians stood in a semicircle on the concourse of BART’s 19th Street/Oakland Station, staring at something brown and clumpy on the tiled floor. This time, it was just peanut butter. “So you spray it with this disinfectant here,” said their instructor, W. Marion Ivey, a softspoken man in a navy blue polo who traveled from Portland, Ore., to teach the class that Thursday. He handed one student a squirt bottle filled with cleaning solution to start the demonstration.
The scene has played out five days a week since early September as BART trains its 140 cleaners in more advanced techniques needed to stay on top of an ever-growing problem of dirty stations. Homelessness and the opioid crisis, combined with persistent fare evaders and a recent crime wave, compelled BART officials to require 40 hours of training for every employee.
Students at the Oakland station, who ranged from brand-new employees to 20-year
veterans, hovered over their colleague as he followed Ivey’s step-by-step process to remove the grime: saturate it with chemicals, wait 10 minutes, pour on a grainy, catlitter-style absorbent, wait two more minutes, sweep up the whole pile and mop it twice. Ivey showed how to draw a perimeter with the mop until a square patch of tile gleamed brighter than the surrounding tile.
For the first time in 18 years — perhaps longer — BART has codified a process to clean its station floors. Until six weeks ago, when Ivey began the first of a series of training sessions on everything from floor buffing to blood removal, BART’s cleaning staff was told to just wing it.
“It used to be, ‘Here’s a mop and a bucket, go have at it,’ ” said Jeff Gon, an employee development specialist with the agency.
As a result, employees haphazardly doused floors and restrooms, judging whether a surface was clean by how it looked and smelled. They wasted cleaning products and caused more dirt to accumulate, Ivey said, because the puddles of cleanser attracted residue.
“It used to be we were eyeballing measurements of chemicals, thinking, ‘Oh, it should be such-and-such,’ ” said Elsie Tucker, who has worked as a cleaner and supervisor at BART for 20 years and will take over training now that Ivey’s contract is up.
“It used to be, ‘Here’s a mop and a bucket, go have at it.’ ” Jeff Gon, BART employee development specialist
Several employees said they used intuition or life experience to decide when a surface was clean.
“I would try to use chemicals that people identify with,” said Jino Vital, who has cleaned stations for three years. “If you go into a restroom, and it smells like bleach, you know it’s clean.”
BART aimed its janitorial employees — called “system service” workers in transit agency patois —at all manner of horrors. They scrubbed blood off walls after fights. They mopped urine. Vital rolled his eyes describing the aftermath of the Golden State Warriors’ championship parades, when every Oakland station was covered in beer and confetti.
Tony Gletty, a utility worker who swabs and sanitizes the train cars, recalled scooping up a pile of feces that must have been a foot long. He said that fresh vomit is so common on BART trains that work crews have their own name for it: “a hot lunch.”
Over the years, the work got harder. Homeless people and injection users sought shelter in BART’s warm trains and stations, and the agency’s unnoticed custodians were burdened with cleaning up after them. They kept their heads down, picking up detritus and sweeping around addicts with needles in their arms. Stations in downtown Oakland and San Francisco — Civic Center in particular — became a type of purgatory, Tucker said.
Pressure mounted on BART to improve its station environments as night and weekend ridership declined — owing partly to competition from Uber and Lyft, and partly to passengers’ concern about filth and safety. Over the past year, BART responded by ramping up cleanings in downtown San Francisco. This month, the agency quadrupled the number of nightly power washings at its Mission Street stations.
Given this extra work — and the ever-evolving science of industrial hygiene — it no longer seemed tenable to dispatch employees without offering them formal classes and a rubric to follow.
Enter Ivey, a former Marine Corps drill instructor who is now among a handful of master cleaners in the nation — at the end of this month the Worldwide Cleaning Industry Association, a trade group in Illinois, will present him with its first “master cleaner of the decade” award.
Beginning in September, Ivey led a series of classes on mopping, floor buffing, sterilizing restrooms and scouring stainless steel. Thursday’s focused on disposing of biohazards. Each worker went through a week of training, culminating with a certificate from the association’s Cleaning Management Institute. Many employees said they found the classes invaluable.
“They should do this type of class for other custodial jobs,” said Ebony Daniels, who recently started working at BART after holding a similar position at the Alameda County courthouse.
Ivey returned to Portland on Friday, entrusting Gon and Tucker with the training. He said he’s confident they’ll stick with the new program.
Yes, BART’s custodial operation had some fundamental problems when Ivey first arrived — like workers not understanding how to use products correctly, he said. But the managers’ willingness to hire an outside consultant was in itself a good sign, he said.
“It showed they’re willing to take a new direction.”
Rachel Swan is a San Francisco Chronicle staff writer. Email: rswan@sfchronicle.com Twitter: @rachelswan