Part 1: http://www.mapinc.org/drugnews/v00.n021.a01.html

Part 2: http://www.mapinc.org/drugnews/v00.n021.a02.html

Part 3: http://www.mapinc.org/drugnews/v00.n021.a03.html

Part 4: http://www.mapinc.org/drugnews/v00.n023.a01.html

Part 5: http://www.mapinc.org/drugnews/v00.n022.a02.html

Part 6: http://www.mapinc.org/drugnews/v00.n022.a01.html

Part 7: http://www.mapinc.org/drugnews/v00.n022.a03.html

DEPARTMENT OF ECOLOGY BURIED BY AN AVALANCHE OF LAB AND DUMPSITE CASES

In the first half of the decade, the number of methamphetamine labs
and dump sites handled by the state Department of Ecology never topped
45 a year. As October ended, the tally had escalated to 619 so far
this year.

"We're going under," Steve Hunter, DOE's supervisor of spill
operations, says in one of many understatements about meth's spread
into Washington state.

Meth cooks are rarely environmentally conscious. They create unholy
messes around them, toxic dumps that kids crawl around in, police
officers wade through and that by law, Hunter's staff has to dispose
of.

Making one pound of meth produces five pounds of waste. While a great
deal of the remains can be handled as household hazardous waste,
Hunter explains, the heavy metals and flammable chemicals like mercury
and phosphorus must be transported to hazardous waste facilities.

Hunter used to spend $300,000 to $400,000 a biennium on private
cleanup contractors; he was used to dealing with oil spills from
wrecks of trains and ships. Now, although he has no more staff than he
did in 1994, DOE workers are doing the cleanup themselves to control
costs.

Another of Hunter's coping mechanisms is to seek leeway from the
police and county sheriff's departments that ask DOE teams to package,
transport and dispose of the meth wastes. Hunter's teams have taken to
not responding at night or on weekends and to requesting that small
labs be bundled together for pickup by DOE on a "milk run."

The near-doubling of labs in just one year has ended Hunter's
budget-stretching tricks. He has asked Gov. Gary Locke for $749,000
extra in 2000, to cover four more workers and buy four additional trucks.

As users' penchant to supply themselves and their friends with meth
proliferates, dangers rise exponentially for everyone. In August DOE
put out an alert to raise public consciousness about the informal dump
sites -- campgrounds, rest areas and open public lands.

In Grays Harbor County, inmate work crews discovered two discarded
labs while they were cleaning ditches along the road.

"In the past, we were more concerned about landlords and motel
personnel being exposed to abandoned drug labs in rental homes and
motel rooms," Hunter said. "As the labs have gotten more mobile,
they're getting closer to everyday people doing everyday things.

In the early days of meth-making, the operations were confined to
isolated areas because of the cat-urine smell given off in the
manufacturing process. The latest method is so streamlined that a cook
can set up shop in a car.

Signs of a drug lab or dump site include ammonia odors, empty ether
spray cans, plastic tubing and broken lab equipment, respirators and
dust masks, scales, propane tanks, empty cold medicine bottles and
coffee filters stained red (from red phosphorus).

Suspected drug labs and dump sites should be reported to the nearest
fire, police or sheriff's department, to 911 or to DOE at 800-258-5990.

[sidebar]

METH LAB CREATES SHOP OF HORRORS

For the folks living in the post-war starter homes on Military Road
South, where Federal Way gives way to Auburn, the house at 34836 is
their own little shop of horrors.

At this juncture in the saga of what a King County environmental
health specialist labels a "nightmare property for the community," the
beat-up, fire-ravaged, debris-strewn, one-story blue house should be
put out of its misery -- and its neighbors out of theirs. Its
demolition would be their salvation.

In the living room next door to the north, Jay Resnovic gestured
toward the scarred property that has been the scene of two SWAT teams
raids and two fires within two years. "I was always taught a home is
what you make of it. Well, look at what they made of this."

The tortured history of 34836 Military Road South is testimony -- and
prophesy -- of what befalls a neighborhood when meth moves in.

"People often make the comparison that meth lab houses are the crack
houses of the '90s but cocaine doesn't have the hazards associated
with it that meth does," observed Jim Lockey, King County
environmental health specialist whose workload on this grubby detail
has doubled in one year.

Meth labs -- mini-Superfund sites, Lockey calls them -- have yet to be
detected in King County in the numbers that plague Pierce County. But
"we're barely able to keep up with the labs we have now," Lockey said.

His other assignment, food inspection, goes by the wayside whenever
law enforcement officers notify him that they've emptied a meth house.
"One meth lab can suck up a week or two of my time" in site visits and
paperwork, Lockey estimated.

But he acknowledges his labors pale in comparison to the angst that
neighbors endure while the clandestine manufacturing process is going
on, and over the unanswered questions about land that has become the
dump for unknown amounts of waste like solvents, acids, salts and
heavy metals.

From the files of the county sheriff, health and code enforcement
departments, a chronology of a community under siege takes shape. An
anonymous caller tipped off police that not only were the 34836
Military Road South owner-occupants and their friends making meth
there, they were selling it.

Surveillance detected -- just as neighbors had continually reported --
a steady stream of vehicles at the residence and odd activity at all
hours. The night before the Oct. 28, 1997, raid, a pungent clue came
from a homeowner who brought police and fire units to the scene by
complaining that "ammonia fumes coming from the property [were] so
strong that their eyes were stinging."

Anhydrous ammonia is a staple of this state's most popular, and
fastest, recipe for making meth.

Thus, the SWAT forces who swarmed onto the site the next day weren't
surprised to find anhydrous ammonia in a 36-inch compressed gas
cylinder. But the lab's location in the backyard was novel -- a small
school bus that had been converted into a living area, featuring a
sink, cook stove and refrigerator.

The requisite accoutrements for the illicit operation were all there:
a propane gas torch (fired and operating), clear glass bowl containing
loose powder, ground-up psuedoephedrine, funnels, jars, coffee
filters, package of lithium batteries and solvents.

The male and female owners of the house were arrested, along with two
other men and one woman. The couple's two children were turned over to
relatives.

Any hopes of the neighbors that life on Military Road South would
return to normal were soon dashed. Signs of more meth-making, by a new
crowd, were soon evident: cars lining the street at any and every
hour, obnoxious odors wafting across fence lines, off-the-wall
behaviors, like occupants spray-painting the house in the dark of night.

Slightly more than a year after the initial bust, an armored car again
rumbled down the two-lane road. On Nov. 25, 1998, officers found a
meth lab inside the house. Spying thick smoke wafting from a pipe atop
the garage and smelling more strong chemical odors, they made a
bizarre discovery: open tunnels, one of which contained two large
tanks with chemicals.

This time, six people were arrested, and at least one teen-ager was
turned over to relatives. Because of the chemical test backlog at the
Washington State Patrol Crime Lab, the county prosecutor's office has
not determined whether to file charges in the case.

Owing to the blatant contamination of the property by the tanks and
the tunnels that were visible -- let alone anything dangerous that
might lurk under layers of junk -- the county quickly declared the
house a public health hazard and branded it unfit for occupancy. (King
County was one of the first in the state to adopt building regulations
governing meth labs.)

By this time the property had changed hands. The new owners were told
the dwelling could not be reoccupied until the entire property was
decontaminated and cleaned up by a contractor licensed by the health
department. The law requires property be cleaned to the best available
technology.

To the neighbors' continuing chagrin, none of that has happened
because of owners' repeated appeals of the county's orders.

Over the last year, the ex-drug house has become an attractive
nuisance. Kids trespass at will; a fence the county installed on the
perimeter was torn down across the driveway. Some of the former
occupants and visitors have returned numerous times, and at odd hours,
to retrieve things left behind, neighbor Resnovic says. After power to
the house was cut, a generator was brought in to light up the garage,
he added.

In April an arson damaged the rear corner of the house on the garage
side; the second arson on Sept. 14 reduced the garage to charred
timbers. On that day the teens in the house that Resnovic shares with
his fiancee, Bobbie Gold, were shaken out of their beds and into
hysterics by successive explosions about 6:15 a.m.

On the south side of 34836, Carl Anderson was sleeping; he'd been up
part of the night watching lights flickering on and off in the garage
next door. The fire filled Anderson's house with smoke and his vinyl
windows began melting. A good-hearted neighbor behind Anderson watered
down the house with a hose.

The blaze in the garage prompted the county to unleash another of its
civil powers -- the emergency abatement of the property. Over seven
days a private contractor demolished what remained of the garage,
hauled the junked cars off (at one time Resnovic had counted 18),
permanently boarded up the house, searched for more buried chemical
tanks (without success) and decontaminated everything but the house
and the septic system.

The tab of $30,000 -- and counting because the house hasn't been
demolished nor the septic system decontaminated -- will be borne by
taxpayers, unless the owners are forced legally to pony up. One bid to
demolish the house came in at $14,000.

The hefty bills associated with righting these drug-induced wrongs
demonstrate why the sheriff's department no longer takes control of
buildings where meth labs are found. Instead it leaves that job to
code enforcement officials. As Det. Marlon Hoyle, one of the
investigators on the Military Road South labs, explained, a judge once
ordered the sheriff's department to pay the $40,000 decontamination
costs for a meth house.

Since that tab forced the department to raid its own bank account for
the cash, Hoyle said, "We don't seize lab houses anymore. It would
break us in a short period of time."

While the last chapter has yet to be written on the house at 34836
Military Road South, Lockey said most residences that have hosted meth
labs are eventually cleaned up, though the process sometimes takes as
long as three years.

The greater hazard, he said, is the house where meth-making goes
undetected; meth cooks are "chemical pack rats," and successive owners
might have no clue what is strewn around, or worse yet, buried, on the
property. Chemicals will invade any porous surface, meaning the carpet
or draperies left in a house could be mini-minefields.

Resnovic and his family worry about the future. Could their
unexplained sicknesses over the past few years be a result of the
toxic chemicals cooking next door? He has looked in amazement at the
protective gear worn by various workers responding to the raids and
fires.

"These guys come in wearing white suits, but we're living right next
door," he said in frustration.

At times Resnovic dreams of borrowing a bulldozer to level the
adjacent property, if only "to force them to finish what I'd start."
But he knows he'd be the one arrested.

Resnovic is hardly sanguine about officialdom's response to what his
family has gone through living next to a house cursed by drugs.

"Nobody tells us what's going on, except to tell us what rights 'they'
have," he says.

EPILOGUE:

Of the five people charged in the 1997 bust, only one has moved
through the criminal justice system. She pleaded guilty to one count
of possession of a controlled substance, received a first-offender
waiver and was put on 24 months' probation. The cases against the
other four people charged with manufacturing meth are in varying
stages. Attorneys for the two owners of the house convinced a judge to
partially disallow the search warrant; the prosecutor's office plans
to appeal that decision to the state Court of Appeals. Of the
remaining defendants, a bench warrant is outstanding for one and trial
has not been set for the other.

[sidebar]

METH MESS MEANS NASTY, DANGEROUS, CLEANUP JOB

With his degree in chemical engineering, Dave Morris is one
over-educated house cleaner. He has to be -- people's lives depend on
him.

Morris is a private contractor; his mainstay is restoring houses
(mostly rentals), motel rooms, public storage facilities and
recreational vehicles that have been chemically mistreated by meth
manufacturers.

He's removed sheetrock from the walls of dwellings where
phenyl-2-propanone was used to follow the original, and most
time-consuming, meth recipe. Stains from red phosphorus in a
second-generation recipe may be ugly but they don't require as drastic
a solution. Those yellow stains on the vinyl floor? That's iodine,
which leaves a "ring around your collar in the floor that just won't
quit."

Morris and his crews move onto the scene after the county has informed
the property owner that no one can occupy the place until it's been
cleaned up and decontaminated commensurate with health laws.

These days meth cleanups occupy 95 percent of Morris'
time.

The process isn't cheap because of the chemicals' toxicity. One lab
test for the presence of meth costs $75; the tab for disposing of a
gallon of contaminated solvent is $500 at a state-approved dump.

The simple motel room job costs $3,000, not including the expense of
replacing items like the mattress. Because chemicals invade porous
items, mattresses are the first out the door; they're cut in half to
ensure no one will try to reuse them.

Motels, especially the extended-stay versions, are increasingly
popular among meth makers. Pay up front, put the do-not-disturb sign
on the door, whip up the product in the kitchenette and be gone,
leaving the wastes for the maid to stumble on.

Cleaning up a house costs $4,000 to $5,000 if there are two to three
bedrooms and the place isn't stuffed with furnishings, Morris said.
Sometimes owners will try to convince him and the county that the
house doesn't need cleaning if the meth was made in a detached shed.

But Morris asks: "Where did the cook go to weigh it up? I guarantee
he's going to the kitchen table. Then he'll clean up in the bathroom
and drop dirty clothes in the bedroom."

The costliest cleanup Morris has done was $24,000. It was on a large
property where the meth maker poured chemicals into a homemade septic
system of oil tanks.

From 10 years of experience, Morris said he has learned that the
culture of this drug is intergenerational.

Once he was hired by a bank to clean up a house near Enchanted Park on
I-5 because the meth-making owner had forfeited the property -- not
long after the man's son died while cooking at a Kent apartment.