A Madness Called Meth: Chapter Nine

THE PIT IN THE BARN

Meth Labs Create Monstrous Messes

Amelia Turse never wanted to own a farm.

But in 1977, her husband, Daniel, was eager to close his shoe repair shop
in the San Fernando Valley in Southern California and buy an olive ranch
near Reedley in Fresno County. Amelia dutifully went along.

"It made him happy," she recalls, "so what the heck?"

Less than three years later, just as farmland prices began to crash, Daniel
died of a heart attack. Unwilling to sell at a loss, Turse spent the next
decade renting her 311/2 acres to a succession of deadbeats who stripped
the place of everything that wasn't nailed down and some things that were:
curtains, screens, fixtures, pumps and motors.

So in 1992, when a man named Antonio Figueroa showed up with an offer to
rent the farm, manage its three living units and see to the upkeep, Turse
accepted. When he paid the rent on time for the next five years, she rejoiced.

"I thought, 'Gee, I don't even have to do anything any more. I don't have
to come up here and scrub and clean up after these idiots.' "

Then in March 1997, she got an inkling as to why. In a barn in the middle
of the property, narcotics agents discovered a meth lab that could produce
32 to 40 pounds in a single batch. Based on empty containers and other
evidence, they estimated the lab had been in operation for years and had
produced more than 700 pounds of meth. After being cut, or diluted, that
amount would have a wholesale street value of more than $10 million.

But that wasn't the worst of it as far as Turse was concerned. In the
barn's dirt floor was a pit 6 feet deep covered with plywood and a layer of
dirt and pierced by a 10-inch-wide PVC pipe. In the pit lay the residue of
years of illicit chemistry -- a sludge of caustic lye, red phosphorus,
flammable solvents and other chemicals 18 inches deep, seeping into
adjacent soil and groundwater.

Only when the narcotics agents were gone did Turse find out whose
responsibility it was to clean up the mess.

Hers.

Meth is made from dangerous stuff: Iodine odors are so strong that cleanup
crews must wear respirators; the cat-urine smell of acid has been known to
trigger seizures; airborne chemicals are powerful enough to eat away the
enamel paint on a refrigerator; chemical-soaked walls often look like
sponges; and carpets can be so saturated with flammables that friction from
walking on them could start a fire.

At lab sites, waste is dumped down sinks, toilets or water wells,
contaminating topsoil and water supplies. But the waste trail doesn't end
there. Trash bags are left by roadsides for an unwitting person to pick up.
Along with the more than 2,000 labs found last year, nearly 400 waste dump
sites were discovered.

One pound of meth, it is estimated, produces 5 pounds of toxic waste. And a
swamp of regulatory confusion and bureaucratic inertia surrounds its
cleanup: Who's responsible, and who's going to pay for it?

When a meth lab is found, which averages once every five hours in
California, the state hires toxic-waste cleanup companies to handle the
immediate removal of the lab, including visible drugs, chemicals and
equipment. This cost California taxpayers $10 million in the 1999-2000
fiscal year.

But the state stops there. For less urgent threats -- ranging from polluted
soil and groundwater to contaminated walls and floors -- the legal burden
for cleanup lies with the property owner. In many cases, property owners
face mandatory cleanup requirements set by health departments. And that can
mean big money.

Turse cashed in a retirement fund to pay a contractor's $10,000 bill. She
might have to spend much more -- as much as $5 million by one estimate --
to clean up what contamination may linger.

Besides the farm, Turse owns her tract home in Camarillo, about 15 miles
east of Ventura, and she has a pension from her 19 years as an admitting
nurse at the nearby state hospital. But she doesn't have $5 million, or
$500,000, or even $50,000 in ready cash.

Now she worries that regulators, from whom she had heard nothing in more
than two years until last July, will reopen her file: "I don't want the
health department to know I'm alive."

A bill that would have helped unsuspecting property owners with meth labs
on their land, like Turse, was introduced in the Legislature this year --
and went nowhere.

The bill, by Sen. Chuck Poochigian, R-Fresno, would have created a state
fund to remove every trace of contamination from a meth lab site, instead
of removing just the most obvious contamination, as existing law provides.

"This is an enormous problem facing rural parts of California," Poochigian
says. "It affects public health and safety and causes landowners a lot of
grief."

But the bill was criticized for lacking a specific funding source, not
spelling out whether the state would be required to clean up every meth lab
or just some of them, lacking criteria for determining when a site had been
successfully cleaned up, and possibly letting property owners off the hook
for toxic contamination that may have occurred because of their negligence.

After gutting it, the Senate Committee on Environmental Quality sent
Poochigian's proposal to the Appropriations Committee, where it was
essentially buried.

Turse's husband had wanted to replace the olive trees on the land with
grapes. But he died before the work was finished, burdening his widow with
a distant farm she never wanted.

She became an absentee landlord.

First, she hired a real estate agent to manage the place. Soon after, she
visited the farm and found chickens walking through the main house. She put
the farm up for sale, but the farm economy was sagging and interest was
nil. "Basically, all I wanted out of it was what I paid for it, just to get
out," she says. "No one offered me anything."

She fired the real estate agent and put ads in the Reedley newspaper to
recruit tenants.

Soon, chickens in the house seemed trivial. "People would come and dump
stuff on the side where the olive trees were torn out," she says. "We had
bedsprings, mattresses -- you name it, it was there."

After a decade of such problems, Antonio Figueroa appeared in 1991 with a
proposition: For no charge, he would cut and clear the untended olive trees
on the half of the property that Daniel hadn't already cut. Turse accepted.

The next year, after he had finished cutting most of the trees and sold the
wood, Figueroa was back with another offer. Would Turse be willing to rent
him the entire property to him and let him find tenants for its house and
two apartments? They agreed on a price, $975 a month for five years. And
for the first time since her husband's death, Turse stopped worrying about
the farm.

"The rents came in," she says. "They were due the first, and I got them the
first or second or third. I got them within reason. I didn't have to go up
there and scrub or clean. They took care of everything."

On the Tuesday before Thanksgiving Day 1996, narcotics agents from the
Fresno County Sheriff's Department watched two men outside a Raisin City
convenience store fill a pickup truck bed with 20-pound bags of ice. When
they finished, one went back into the store and came out with a 12-pack of
beer and a bottle of soda.

"The quantity of ice purchased was not consistent with the amount of ice
necessary for a 12-pack of beer and a 2-liter soda," one agent deadpanned
in a subsequent affidavit.

In fact, the detectives strongly suspected the ice was destined for a meth
lab, where large amounts of it are used to cool down a chemical reaction
that occurs in one step of the cooking process.

After following the truck to a nearby mobile home and watching the place
for a few months, agents raided it in March 1997 and collected enough
evidence to get a search warrant for another suspected meth lab -- the one
on Turse's farm.

Figueroa wasn't there when a meth task force swooped down on the farm. He
had checked into the Fresno County Jail one week earlier to serve a
two-year sentence for drunken driving and probation violations.

In a back bedroom of the main house, where Figueroa lived, agents
discovered a large cardboard box containing a 22-liter glass reaction
vessel, a heating mantle and a rheostat -- the basic equipment for a large
meth lab.

Agents got Figueroa's keys from his common-law wife, and the keys included
those to the barn out back. When they opened the barn door, the smell
almost knocked them off their feet.

All around them lay the spoor of illegal drug manufacturing. Cylinders of
hydrogen chloride gas, used in the final stage of the process to covert
liquid meth to a crystalline powder; more than 200 empty 5-gallon cans of
Freon refrigerant, an ozone-destroying chemical that labs use in abundance
to separate liquid meth from the chemical soup of the production process;
empty bags of caustic soda beads, another chemical used in the separation
process; an empty 100-pound cardboard drum of iodine and a full 5-kilogram
container of red phosphorus, two chemicals used in the initial reaction
that produces meth; and more laboratory glassware.

And in an alcove on the barn's east side, the mysterious pit, its presence
betrayed by the 10-inch PVC pipe rising from the floor.

As a result of the raid, Figueroa pleaded no contest to meth-manufacturing
charges in January 1998. He was sent to state prison until March 1999, when
he was paroled and deported to Mexico, where he remains.

One week after the raid, Turse visited the farm with a Fresno County Health
Department inspector. He gave her the bad news -- she was responsible for
cleaning up the contamination.

"He was a very nice man," she says. "He was just doing his job. He pointed
out certain things to me that needed to be done, and he gave me the name of
two people to call about removing the hazardous waste."

She chose Robert Lassotovitch of PARC Environmental in Fresno. A few days
later, Lassotovitch took a crew to the site to take soil samples and make
plans to map and remove the contamination. A state contractor had hauled
away leftover chemicals and dozens of contaminated containers. But the barn
still was littered with used rubber gloves, empty caustic soda bags, empty
cylinders of hydrogen chloride gas and some 200 empty refrigerant cans. And
in the alcove under a low, slanted metal ceiling lay the pit, its cover
still not opened, what it contained still a mystery.

"All we knew," Lassotovitch says, "was that we had a 10-inch piece of PVC
pipe in the ground. Where it went to, nobody knew. . . . The hole was still
covered. The pipe was in place. It stunk to high heaven."

Lassotovitch's crew disassembled the alcove's roof and longest wall, lifted
the plywood cover from the pit and found a dense, wet layer of lye, red
phosphorus and other chemicals. It had an alkalinity level of 14 -- strong
enough to cause serious skin burns on contact.

They tore into the earth with a backhoe and began loading the contaminated
soil into a truck for transport to a hazardous waste landfill in
Buttonwillow in Kern County. But as they dug, something curious happened.
At the base of the hole, an eerie cloud of white vapor formed. Something in
the soil -- they never figured out exactly what -- was forming the vapor
cloud when it came into contact with air.

Then, as the digging reached 6 feet, an inky black liquid began collecting
in a pool at the base of the hole, flowing in from the surrounding soil. It
looked as if "the liquid migrated downward until it hit a layer of
hardpan, at which point it started to spread laterally," a health
department inspector's report noted.

They never figured out what was in the liquid or how far into the
surrounding groundwater it had spread. But it wasn't the first time
Lassotovitch had seen that kind of contamination, and that worries him.

"This is my concern, and I don't think anybody's really addressed this," he
says. "If we're finding only 5 percent to 10 percent of the clandestine
labs, and the other 90 percent to 95 percent are just dumping stuff out
there, what's going to happen to our water supply in 10 to 15 years?"

Eventually, Lassotovitch's crew dug up and hauled away 44 cubic yards of
contaminated sludge and soil. At his usual rate, the work should have cost
$18,000. For Turse, he dropped the price to $10,000.

"You feel for some people, and she was one that I felt for."

Turse's troubles didn't end when Lassotovitch's trucks rumbled away.
Because of the possible groundwater contamination, officials from the
Central Valley Regional Water Quality Control Board proposed additional
tests of the soil and nearby wells. They required Turse to spend an
additional $600 on an engineering report and, in January 1998, sent her a
letter approving a work plan proposed by the report.

She ignored it. Regulators waited two years before sending out another
letter, which reached Turse in mid-July.

"We tried hard to keep the costs down," says Russell Walls, a senior
engineer in the board's Fresno office. "It wasn't her fault, but it's the
property owner's responsibility, so she's kind of stuck."

Turse hired an attorney who won a $1 million civil judgment against
Figueroa for her estimated cleanup costs, but Lassotovitch says the cost
might range as high as $5 million if there is widespread groundwater
contamination.

She's never collected from Figueroa and knows she never will. Her lawyer
proposed rounding up Figueroa's only identifiable assets -- some horses and
cattle -- for an auction. But Turse decided against it.

"He said you might be able to get some money back," she says. "There's no
point. I don't know what a cow is worth."

Chapter 9b, http://www.mapinc.org/drugnews/v00/n1504/a04.html