HAZMAT TEAM CALLED TO ROAN MOUNTAIN TO CLEAN UP METH LAB

A Ferguson-Harber hazardous materials team under contract with the federal
Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA) arrived in Roan Mountain shortly
after 9 p.m. Monday to remove a methamphetamine laboratory found earlier in
the afternoon on a mountain near Old Railroad Grade Road. Carter County
Sheriff John Henson said a Roan Mountain resident found a backpack while
out walking Monday afternoon, and called authorities. The sheriff's
department, so far, has developed three suspects, Henson said. Those
involved, he said, "went up out behind this house on top of the mountain
here in a wooded area and did a cook Saturday night.

They brought their remains down in a backpack and throwed it out in a ditch
up there." Because of the noxious odors associated with the chemicals used
to manufacture meth, Henson said, "They're cooking a lot outside now
instead of cooking in a house because they know people are going to call
the law on them. So they're going out in remote areas and cooking in the
woods." When Lt. Mike Fraley arrived on the scene Monday afternoon shortly
after 2 p.m. he noticed that the items, some of which were in black plastic
bags, were beginning to smoke.

As the sun beat down, "it got so hot it was smoking and about to catch
fire," according to the sheriff. Members of the sheriff's department, First
Judicial District Drug Task Force, DEA, Tennessee Bureau of Investigation,
Tennessee Constables Association, Roan Mountain Volunteer Fire Department
and Carter County Rescue Squad were at the scene until after 10 p.m.,
awaiting the arrival of a hazardous materials team and closing a portion of
the road to through traffic. "You've got a lot of that junk left after you
do a cook," Henson said, while waiting for the Hazmat team. "We were
waiting on these people from Knoxville to clear the mess up. This is what's
so time-consuming and expensive -- getting these people in here to do away
with this stuff.

That's some dangerous fumes.

You can breathe that stuff and it will gel your lungs. "The odor down there
at the scene would just about knock you down where the sun had shined on
that stuff and had got it hot and was getting it fired back up again,"
Henson said. In an apparent unrelated incident, Deputy Shannon Deloach
responded Saturday to a house on Roaring Creek in Roan Mountain where
another meth lab was found. "It was altogether different," according to the
sheriff. "They were in a house and had just started to cook when the
deputies got a call up there and figured out what they had. They backed off
and called DTF. "We had to call Hazmat and get them in there to destroy the
rest of the lab. The same way with this one. Anytime you have a lab, you've
got to have a cleanup.

And it's very expensive to have one of these things disposed of. You've got
to wear these rubber suits and everything else when you're handling this
stuff, and you can't inhale it [the gas]. It's dangerous," he said.
According to a DTF agent at the scene Monday night, the suspects used a
"cold cook" method to manufacture the methamphetamine. "Mostly with this
method they use mineral spirits, and they also use Liquid Fire along with a
combination of Rock Salt to create HCO -- hydrogen chloride gas. It also
creates hydrogen gas, which is very volatile," he said. "They use a bright
spotlight and hit it with that light, and then as the hydrogen chloride gas
is going into the meth base, crystals start forming, and once the crystals
form, they filter it out again using coffee filters and a funnel, and
what's left in the filter is the finished product.

It's really wet, so now they've got to dry it. They can also at this point
wash it if they have acetone.

If it's not a white color, they will wash it with acetone and get all of
the impurities out of it," according to the agent. In addition to the
backpack, investigators found several jars, a mixing pot, a tank of
anhydrous ammonia, a nebulizer, and numerous plastic tubes. Because the
anhydrous ammonia was in an unapproved cylinder, according to the agent,
the Hazmat team had to put it in water and then bleed it off slowly, the
agent said. Because of the danger of explosion, emergency responders were
moved away from the scene until the chemical was transferred. The incident
is under investigation with arrests expected soon, according to the sheriff.