You work for the Federal Bureau of Investigation, and you're sitting on two pounds of seized methamphetamines that you need to get rid of. So what do you do? Burn it all in a pet shelter smack-dab in the middle of town, of course.
It sounds beyond parody, but these are the events that played out in Billings, Montana, last Wednesday. And it did not go according to plan.
As the Associated Press reports, the toxic smoke cloud from the incinerated meth — a dangerous and addictive stimulant — didn't waft harmlessly into the atmosphere, but instead began to fill the building.
In the aftermath, over a dozen employees of the Yellowstone Valley Animal Shelter were evacuated and sent to the hospital. It was "not a party," shelter director Triniti Halverson told the AP. Halverson suffered from an intense headache and a sore throat, while her colleagues experienced dizziness, sweating, and coughing.
The ludicrous debacle comes as the FBI faces scrutiny over politicization under the Trump administration and a poorly handled manhunt over the past week.
According to Billings assistant city administrator Kevin Iffland, the smoke got sucked back into the building because of "negative pressure." There was supposed to be a fan on standby to blow it back out in events like these, but Iffland said it wasn't ready or turned. It's unclear if the authorities knew about the fan situation before the burning started.
The shelter shares a building with the city's animal control division. To incinerate the drugs, the feds were using the division's furnace for cremating euthanized animals, which isn't an uncommon practice.
But for reasons that boggle the mind, seemingly no one at the shelter — not even its director Halverson — knew about the drug burns.
At first, Halverson assumed the fumes, reasonably, were from burning carcasses. And it was only after the shelter's fourteen employees were rushed to the hospital that they learned what had really happened, via a phone call from a city official: that they'd just inhaled loads of meth smoke.
Most of the workers spent hours in a hyperbaric oxygen chamber for treatment. Heroically, they'd lingered in the building to make sure everyone got out safely, including the animals.
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