The Local Economy
posted by CCFriday morning started a bit interesting. Ling came back from walking Punky and commented that there was a police car parked in front of a house on the same corner as us (not quite a neighbour, but close). I suggested that maybe they were being visited by a friend who was only recently off duty. When I walked outside, though, I could see the officer was writing a report in her car, so it was a call. Maybe a case of domestic violence?
On our way to the bus stop, we saw a second police car come in. Okay, maybe they were rendezvousing. I didn’t really think about it Friday night.
Saturday morning, as I was taking Tim to soccer, I noticed a sign out front of the house. It had a drawing of a very familiar looking green leaf on it, with a line drawn through (the “no ….” symbol) and a police phone number.
Okay, I thought, maybe they had joined a neighbourhood watch project, to keep an eye out for grow-ops. The police would never just put a sign out front advertising a crime, right? But the seeds of doubt had been sown. Try as I might, I couldn’t remember seeing anybody come or go from that house since it had been sold in the summer.
Later in the day, Ling and I wandered out to ask the two people moving around outside what was going on — it turns out they were from hydro looking for where the line had been spliced (splicing an underground power line, that’s pretty impressive).
So we had one, right in our neighbourhood. A grow-op. 4 houses over from us. Looking at the house from the outside, you would never guess — well groomed, brand new roof, well taken care of. I talked to the neighbour on one side, and he agreed with me, there was nothing that would have made us suspect, and we wondered how the police had found out?
Talking to the neighbours on the other side, we got our answer. Apparently our house had been in a spot where the winds had just happened to miss it. They had been smelling something really bad for months (described as like a skunk, but all day), and had regularly smelled the proprietors, umm, testing their product. So had several other houses and so, apparently, had the church behind the house.
As it turns out several people had been in contact with the police, and they finally narrowed it down to the specific house, and busted it. The police have reassured us that it was purely growing, there were no deals going on in the house, so the dangers associated with that were not present.
I will admit it is a bit of a shock, sure I read about grow-ops in the paper all the time, but I never really thought about the fact that I could be walking by one every day. I had always pictured a grow-op as having a lawn that hadn’t been mowed, mattresses against the windows, and the house falling apart. Instead this place was possibly better kept outside than ours!
Although there is good news out of this … the neighbourhood that we live in is one that everybody knows each other, and keeps an eye out for everyone else. This one was caught, and caught fairly quickly.
Hopefully it remains like that.
January 27th, 2009 at 5:12 pm
The good news here is that this one was dealt with. Because of the numbers, far to few are actually closed down. There were know drug houses around some of my schools, and little was done because the police had a limited number of officers and time. And thank our lucky stars it wasn’t a meth house. Had one near a school, and when it was closed the police evacuated the entire block. Society is changing!
January 28th, 2009 at 11:11 am
I put two-and-two together this morning.
Sometime last year the radios in our house stopped working (AM at least), every single one of them had so much interference they were un-listenable; since then we have been trying to figure out what changed in the neighbourhood to create so much interference.
This morning I suddenly realized not only was the radio working again, but it had been working all week (Mon, Tues, Wed).
I’ll bet all the equipment, and maybe the power splice, in this house was the source of our interference.