WSNIA - The Educator

INFORMATION ♦ EDUCATION ♦ ENFORCEMENT

THE EDUCATOR - Fall 2000

A City Block of Cold Medicine

By Lt Dave Thompson, Yakima County Sheriff's Office

Dispatch called me with an urgent message: “Call Department of Ecology as soon as possible.” Joy Redfield-Wilder, D.O.E. public affairs officer, told me that Mark Layman and Steve Hunter were out on Pine Mountain Road and they had bad news. “This lab was the biggest in the history of the State of Washington in terms of production capability and contamination.”

Lee Hargroves of the Yakima Public County Works Code Enforcement, requested my assistance posting a property with a Nuisance-Abatement Warrant. The property is 18 miles west of Yakima in a rural area on Pine Mountain Road, in Tampico, Washington.

A week earlier Lee and I arrived and noted that the property looked abandoned and not cared for. The 10-acre parcel of land had two junk hulks parked on it, black plastic and lumber was strewn about and a section of the land was carved out for a pole building. From what we observed, we became suspicious that this had been a meth lab site and disposal area. Between two travel trailers were a half-dozen burn barrels with about three inches of the original blue enamel left at the bottom.

I had a “tinny” taste in my mouth and saw a massive amount of expended brass in a variety of calibers. I recognized 9mm, 10mm, 38 super, .45 caliber, and semi-automatic rifle brass. My next observation stopped me dead in my tracks. The bottom of a white plastic pill bottle, the type used for over-the-counter cold medicines, cut cleanly away. I had been to enough training seminars where Detective Tom Lind told us that methamphetamine cookers don’t have the time to remove the childproof cap, the foil seal, and the cotton before removing the tablets. It was simply quicker to cut the bottom of the bottle with a box knife.

I scanned the area and noticed two full 55-gallon drums of methanol lying next to one of the trailers. In an effort to conceal the barrels, a piece of plywood was set on top of one of the barrels and a cardboard box was placed over the other. The presence of discarded “cold tablet blister packs” on the ground, jars of Red Devil Lye, Coleman Fuel, and barbecue starter fluid, told me I had a huge Methamphetamine Lab staring at me.

When I found a place to use a cell phone to call a drug task force, I found myself on a burial site for over 40, five-gallon solvent cans. Detective Chad Peterschick arrived; we obtained a search warrant and started the investigative process.

While there was some deliberation about removing the trailers from the property that night to a secure facility, I wandered the property a little more. I was intrigued by the manner in which the black plastic and wood had been stacked at one end of the opened pole building. Lee Hargroves had found a section of poured concrete about a foot below ground level under the pile. It looked like somebody had poured a mobile home slab then abandoned the idea and covered it back up with dirt and rocks. With my shoe I scraped the concrete to remove the light layer of dirt. All of a sudden the dirt funneled itself into a hole and wouldn’t fill up. I grabbed a shovel and started to dig. Others grabbed shovels when they noticed the gravel being removed was forming a perfect 3 x 6 foot rectangle of plywood. We removed the plywood and discovered a set of stairs leading into a concrete bunker.

The discovery of this confined space would require respirators and medical aid crews to stand by during entry. The following day there we had a full-fledged operation in progress. Everybody involved in the response to the site was on time and well equipped. Arrangements were made with the American Red Cross to have a lunch crew respond to feed the 25 or so investigators, Fire Personnel, Ecology members, and various County Public Works staff who were on hand. Because of the remoteness of the location, Mark Layman thought it might not be a bad idea to have access to bathroom facilities. I called Jim Hall from the Sheriff’s Search and Rescue Office and within an hour we had the S.A.R. Port-a-Potty trailer delivered to the site.

We entered the 24x60 feet bunker and found a half-dozen propane cylinders, the remnants of a marijuana grow operation. and some other supplies used in the production of methamphetamine. This included a hydrochloric gas cylinder, which indicated the lab was a “production” size lab capable of producing multiple pounds of methamphetamine at a time.

Once we finished our investigation, the meth lab cleanup began. I went back to the site where the contractor’s backhoe was busy at work. They had caved in the top of the bunker Random scoops of two to three feet down in the soft dirt areas revealed one to three-inch layers of tablet binder (the discarded material used to hold the cold tablet together once the ephedrine is extracted). The buried material and dumpsites covered an area about the size of an entire city block.

I stopped at the Tampico store last week. It’s a place where people meet, drink coffee and shoot the breeze. The people who live in the Tampico area pride themselves on their community spirit and their knowing what everybody does in the small town setting. There is a sense that their trust has been violated and their properties contaminated by poison-dealing criminals.