Excitement in my town

[[JiF]Mike]

Yesterday I posted a link to a fire the was happening in my town, it was a suspected meth lab at the time. Here's a link to the full story: http://www.wmur.com/news/23066041/detail.html It was reported by New England Cable News, and of course the local NH station. I drive by the place everyday on my way to/from work. We have a big drug problem downtown, nice to see some of it shutdown. Sad for the other families of that place though.

[[JiF]Riceman]

That's crazy mike. I town I grew up in had a meth labs get busted but never anything like this. This just goes to show how much of a problem meth is, and not only the drug but the dangers that go into producing it as well. There's a lot of dangerous chemicals and reactions that go into making meth and it's typically made by people that have little to no knowledge of chemistry. This can end in dangerous scenarios like what happened down the road from you. Just hope no innocent neighbors were hurt.

[[JiF]ALargeWoodenBadger]

My Brother is a firefighter in St. John's, about ten years back he was called to a fire in an old building in the dock area. He and his partner were given the task of clearing the building of people while the rest of the crew hocked up the hoses. In the course of this they unknowingly kicked in the door of a Meth lab. Dale said he look up at the burning room and saw the tubs of chemicals just before they exploded. He was blown through two walls and was found lying on the pavement on the street. Fully conscious and cursing like, well Dale. His oxygen tank was crush flat and was credited with saving his life. He had a broken back and several cracked ribs but eventually he healed up and returned to his squad.

His partner was on the other side of the door when the explosion happened. The wall he was standing beside was apparently older and built out of brick. He said one second he was looking at my brother, the next second he was looking at a "bugs bunny" type body shaped hole in the wall where my brother had been standing. The next wall over also had a body shaped hole in it as well where Dale had shot through it. Apparently the years of watching cartoons instead of studying finally paid off.

Dale was always one to leave an impression.

[[JiF]major confusion]

Cool story Badger. Thanks. I laugh just thinking about Bug's Bunny.
Glad your bro' recovered from that.

[[JiF]philippe]

Hi Mike,

We have a least the same problem arround Paris, hoppefully i don't leave in Paris....
And I support all the fire fighters for their bravery in front of the danger to rescue the victims.

Also we have in Calais a lot of immigrants from Afganistan, Irak and Africa they all want to travel from Calais to England on ferries or the shuttle, they are arround 1000 arround Calais they sleep outside in the land etc....sometimes it is very dangerous to meet them in the town..

for the moment they are not in my village....

see u soon

[[JiF]Mike]

The story was updated today with more details. This is from The Concord Monitor a local paper.

$500,000 bail in meth production

With their former neighbors looking on, a Franklin couple charged with running two methamphetamine labs in their apartment building were held on $500,000 cash bail yesterday.

The police said Jeremy Clough, 31, was preparing to cook a batch of the volatile drug when armed federal agents dressed in protective gear raided his Central Street apartment Tuesday morning. Rebecca Field, 33, his girlfriend, was also arrested in the sweep.

Under a special state law written for methamphetamine possession, both face two felony charges that carry a penalty of up to 30 years in state prison.

Prosecutor Chris Ahern said that the high bail was the only way to guarantee their appearance given the potential penalties and that they are now homeless after fire ripped through their building during the raid.

"They were manufacturing a highly explosive drug in a building where juveniles were present," Ahern said yesterday in Franklin District Court.

They also face misdemeanor charges of child endangerment in connection with making drugs while Field's three young children lived in the apartment.

In separate hearings, both Clough and Field said they did not object to what Judge Edward Gordon called "extremely high bail."

Gordon entered pleas of not guilty on their behalf for all of the charges.

Affidavits and search warrants in the case were sealed to protect the names of confidential informants, according to Franklin police Chief David Goldstein.

The Tilton police learned of the labs from one of those informants Sunday. By Monday night, Tilton, Franklin and federal agents held a meeting to plan Tuesday's raid.

It drew about 20 officers who broke down the door to arrest Clough and Field. Within a minute of their entrance, the building was on fire. Accelerated by chemicals from the lab, the fire grew to three alarms, drawing in 75 firefighters and hazardous materials experts from nearly two dozens surrounding communities.

The decision to hold the raid in broad daylight was based largely on trying to guarantee the safety of Field's children, Goldstein said. The police wanted to make sure the children and a number of others who lived in the building were at school.

"Anytime children are involved in anything, you have to sort of sit back and look at the overall situation," Goldstein said. "But this was very important to do in the daytime."

About 30 minutes before the raid, city officials were briefed on the plan and nearby Franklin High School was ordered into lockdown.

Eight students were transported to the hospital in multiple trips by the Andover Rescue Squad, according to Franklin fire Capt. Robert Goodearl.

All of those students were suffering from "hyperpsychosis," he said.

"I think it was just a big fire and all the kids thought they smelled smoke," he said. "I think their minds were just playing tricks on them."

A police officer was treated and released Tuesday for smoke inhalation. Three bystanders went to the hospital to complain of respiratory issues from the chemical fire, according to Danielle Mostoller, spokeswoman for Franklin Regional Hospital.

Mostoller said all of those patients were released in fine condition.

The police said Clough and Field were making methamphetamine in their second-floor apartment. They asked their landlords to store boxes in an unoccupied apartment below them but were actually using it to run a second lab, according to the police.

Landlord Nancy Trowsdale said she was in the upstairs apartment three weeks ago and didn't notice anything out of the ordinary.

"It's not like they were scumbag, nasty people or anything," she said. "You can never know."

Trowsdale said she received no complaints from tenants or the police about Clough and Field.

"If I had smelled something suspicious, we have friends on the (police department) in other towns, I would have reported it," she said. "I live in the area. I don't want that here. It's not who we are."

The couple had lived in the apartment for less than six months. Court records show they have lived at a number of other addresses in Belmont and Franklin.

Yesterday, residents of 164 Central St. took an accounting of what could be salvaged from the building and searched for new places to live. Not including Clough, Field and her children, seven people were left homeless.

Richard Marsh, who lived in the building, said three of his cats were found alive. Marsh and his wife, Nancy, have been living in a motel since the fire.

Scott Regan, who was carried out of the house barefoot by the police while it was on fire Tuesday, said yesterday the landlords gave him his security deposit back. He spent the day looking for a new apartment.

Special contractors brought in by the Drug Enforcement Administration cleared the building of toxic chemicals from the labs late Tuesday, according to Franklin fire Chief Royal Smith. The building will likely be torn down because it suffered $100,000 in damage.

The state fire marshal's office is investigating the fire as an arson, Goldstein said.

[[JiF]Uncle Stinky]

There's a book called Methland that studies the effect of meth labs on a small town in Iowa, and it evidently is a good but depressing read.

Here's the link to it Amazon, with some reviews.

http://www.amazon.com/Methland-Death-Li ... 1596916508

Here's an excerpt from a review:

In his persuasive new book, Methland, journalist Nick Reding reveals the fallacies of this myth [of small town America] by showing how, over the past three decades, small-town America has been blighted by methamphetamine, which has taken root in--and taken hold of--its soul. Over four years, Reding studied meth production and addiction in Oelwein, Iowa, a rural community about 300 miles from Chicago. With a population of just over 6,000, Oelwein serves as a case study of the problems many small towns face today. Once a vibrant farming community where union work and small businesses were plentiful, Oelwein is now struggling through a transition to agribusiness and low-wage employment or, alternatively, unemployment. These conditions, Reding shows, have made the town susceptible to methamphetamine.

There is no more horrifying example of the drug's ravages than Roland Jarvis, who began using meth as a way to keep up his energy through double shifts at a local meat-processing plant. Apparently doing so was nothing unusual, and until the early 1980's, an Oelwein physician would routinely prescribe methamphetamines for fatigued workers. When the plant where Jarvis worked was de-unionized and his wages slashed by two-thirds, Jarvis went from an occasional meth user to a habitual user and then a manufacturer. One night, in a fit of drug-induced paranoia, he attempted, disastrously, to dispose of his cooking chemicals. In the ensuing fire, he was so horribly burned that paramedics could only watch while the flesh literally melted from his body and Jarvis begged the police to kill him. Reding's description of Jarvis now, using his fingerless hands to lift a meth pipe to his noseless face, is among the most haunting images in the book.

Reding tracks the decline--and, ultimately, the limited resurgence--of Oelwein, while also examining the larger forces that have contributed to its problems. He links meth to the gathering power of unregulated capitalism beginning in the 1980's. It was then, he argues, that one-time union employees earning good wages and protected by solid benefits, like Roland Jarvis, began to see their earnings cut and their benefits disappear. Undocumented migrants began taking jobs at extraordinarily low wages, thereby depressing the cost of labor. Meth, with its opportunity for quick profit and its power to make the most abject and despondent person feel suddenly alive and vibrant, found fertile ground. Meanwhile, in Washington, pharmaceutical lobbyists were working hard to keep DEA agents from attempting to limit access to the raw ingredients; ephedrine and pseudoephedrine, meth's core precursors, were simply too vital to the lucrative allergy-remedy market. Though he avoids making the argument in such stark terms, Reding positions the meth epidemic as the triumph of profits over the safety and prosperity of America's small-town inhabitants.

[[JiF]Riceman]

Have any of you seen the tv-show Breaking Bad?

[[JiF]Mike]

I know the name, but have never seen it.

[[JiF]Riceman]

It's a really good tv-drama series on FX about a High School chemistry teacher who resorts to making meth to pay for his families needs after he is diagnosed with lung cancer. It's a crazy show and it's got the actor who played the Dad in Malcolm in the Middle.