Week 33 – Cannabis-gate: A large scale operation 🏚🔌💡🧯💸⛏⚙️ 😱

After finding the front door smashed in and the police having seized around £100,000 worth of cannabis plants (see Week 32 – Cannabis-gate: Part One 😱) in we went!

Almost every room had been used to grow weed including living room, dining room, two bedrooms, all three chambers of the cellar and the entire loft space. The only rooms that weren’t used were the kitchen and bathroom which were kept as living spaces.

The sheer scale of it was phenomenal. We were walking around with our jaws on the floor. Huge industrial filters; great metal cylinder shaped things, hung from the ceilings. Giant holes had been smashed into the chimney breasts and ceilings, so that big cube-shaped pumps could pump air along the industrial sized pipes before going up and out of the chimney. UV lights were hanging from their steel cables across every inch of the ceilings. Big plastic tubs filled with fabric conditioner were littered around here and there trying to mask some of the smell. And there were plant pots everywhere. Some big, some small. Hundreds of them, all filled with compost, covering the floor of every room.

The cellar rooms had been completely cloaked in plastic sheeting. Bags of fertiliser were piled up to the ceiling down there. We hauled around fifty bags up.

The internal doors had been taken off their hinges and had a dozen or so transformers screwed into them. They had gotten so hot that they had deeply scorched the wood. We shuddered to think of the fire risk in this mid-terrace.

They had tapped into the electricity before it hit the meter to power the UV lights and transformers. Quite clever really.

The tenant was supposedly Vietnamese, which explains some of the strange foodstuffs we found in the fridge (chicken feet etc). One of our neighbours commented that it was surprising they hadn’t booby trapped the house. I laughed thinking it was a joke referencing the guerrilla tactics of the Vietnam war, but later I googled it and found that it isn’t too uncommon for Vietnamese cannabis farmers to lay booby traps to protect their crop – things like electrifying windows and razor blades on light switches! Glad we didn’t find anything like that!

Trying to remain as private as possible, the tenants hadn’t bothered taking the bins out weekly. Instead they had thrown all their rubbish under the house in bin bags and they stank!

In amongst this rubbish we found several bags of cannabis plants that were in various stages of decay. From this, we estimated there to have been three different crops grown at the address, plus the one taken by the police. That’s 200 plants at £500 each = £100, 000 per crop x 4 crops = £400, 000. Not bad for 5 months work!

The final, and most shocking, place we explored was the loft. Without meaning to stereotype, it brought back memories of the Cu Chi tunnels. You had to crawl through this long tunnel until it opened out into a large space. The insulation had been rolled back, the floors, ceilings and walls had been covered in plastic sheet and every single inch was covered with pots. Including on top of the tunnel we had just crawled through! It was a sight I’ll never forget! It was so hot and stuffy up there and the thick sickly sweet air was almost unbearable. We couldn’t stay up there for long.

We were left reeling by the scale of this thing! Never mind, time to get it fixed up and claim some money back from the insurance, or so we thought … to be continued …