Meth House Call- Video

This call, as I say in the video, was day two of a call that began when a fire at an in the middle of nowhere ranch led to the discovery of the meth lab that was there. The Fire Department and the Sheriff's department usually responded to calls like that together, this time it paid off for them. For the owners, not so much.

I had begun to stop leaving the date and time on all the time on the camera. I used to get tired of seeing it in most of the videos on shows of the era like "Funniest Home Videos" so I went to great pains to not show it in our videos. If I had at least jotted down the info that would have been a great alternative!
Now, in going over the videos I have while converting them to DVD, I wish I hadn't omitted the information so much as having that day and date sure would help over a decade later!

Back to the call-
It had begun the day before, a Saturday if I remember correctly (see.... no date!), with me having to bring a horse trailer from the valley to help area officer Suzanne, start the process of picking all the animals up that were on the property. All the residents had been arrested and that was standard procedure back then. If there were no people left or identified as care takers for any animals, they all got impounded and could be later reclaimed at the shelter. In this case all the animals were to be taken two hours away to the Devore Animal Shelter.
So after I made the over two hour drive with the trailer we got busy after finally finding the place, literally out in the middle of nowhere off a power line road near the Harper Dry Lake area North and West of the community of Hinkley, California.
Hinkley was later made kind of (in)famous by the 2000, Julia Roberts film "Erin Brockovich" about the polluted and undrinkable water from the chemical plants in the area and the dumped chemicals getting into the local ground water. Oh, and by the way, that is still happening all these years later too. I saw a few months back that bottled water was being trucked in for the school and residents because the water was so unsafe, still!! I guess luckily for me, I always carried my own 5 gallon cold water container in my truck and NEVER drank the local water while 'out in the field'.
Again, back to the call!-
At the 'ranch' there were a couple of dogs and quite a few horses, chickens, pigs, all kinds of hay and feed for everything too. Suzanne and I loaded up our trucks and the trailer with what we could and took it down to Devore and impounded it all. Since everything at the ranch was in OK shape and with all the food and such there, we made sure everything would be alright overnight and arrangements were made to go back the next day with another ACO, Stacy, and the other larger "stock" trailer the department had at the time to pick up all that was left and still there.
We were to pick up the animals and also take all the hay and feed we could load into the trucks and trailers to help feed all the animals we were taking.
As the video shows and I say, it was another two plus hours out the next morning and we get there and see what's still there to take. Believing that, correctly, some of the possible owners of some of the horses might, after hearing of the bust, might sneak in and take their animals. The property being so far out wasn't under any kind of guard overnight. So anything could have happened.
What we did find though on arrival as I mention was that since the place was going to be a "practice burn" and demolished since it was an illegal drug house, the fire department personnel had come through and 'cleaned out' the place of all kinds of equipment that could be used by the station or by them. Things like several generators, power tools, things like that. The thing that bugged us was the personnel that had large livestock at home had taken every bit of the Hay and horse feed that had been there the night before.
Yes, we would have taken it all too had it been there, we still took all the bagged feed still there, but we wouldn't take it for us. It would have been to take care of all the livestock we were taking.

So we loaded everything we could up. I remember that some chickens may have escaped. That did often happen with those especially if there were many loose, even in a large enclosure, it was very difficult to catch and remove them without a few getting out too. They would be left to fend for themselves because after escape they could never be caught again. In typing this I'm remembering the phrase that one ACO used to say all the time about the "circle of life". Oh well.

I know the video doesn't show any of the work of catching and loaded or even unloading the animals. Most of the video, and I had to trim it to fit the 15 minutes YouTube maximum length, is of the long drive out and the desolate area. I know I remember back then I wanted to be able to show what the area was like to drive and be in. Nice in winter and miserable in Summer, Stacy and I once talked about maybe moving farther 'out' since our area had begun to get crowded, to the Barstow area, NOT Hinkley! We'd also thought about moving to the mountains and the Big Bear area, but that area was already overcrowded, winter and summer!

We thought about it, didn't happen. I really have never been a fan of really hot, like over 110 F (+43 C) in the daytime with a low of 90 F (+32 C) at night. That happens in mid summer in that area due to the lower altitude and distance from any cooling winds like the Phelan area had from the Cajon Pass and the valley that cooled that high desert area down except for a few summer nights each year. Relatively cooler yes, but still often much cooler than out towards Barstow, Dagget and Newberry Springs!

The outcome of the call? Well as I mention in the video, Stacy found paperwork that many of the horses the department had impounded were actually papered and worth a lot of money each. They were all ultimately reclaimed as I recall. I never had to go back out there on any calls so i don't know if the fire department had their burn or not. Probably did though as that was often exactly what happened with drug places like this one was.

So, that's the story of this video!