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.
“We were trying to pull everybody out to get them out of that smoke, and there was billowing smoke out of the room,” the shelter’s trap-neuter-return coordinator Lisette Worthey told KRTV. “Some of us who were trying to pull the kittens out, myself included, started having symptoms, headaches, little bit of dizziness, lightheadedness.”
Thanks to their efforts, all of the shelter’s 75 cats and dogs were relocated or put into foster homes while the shelter remains closed. But a litter of four kittens are being closely monitored because they were trapped in a closed room that was filled with smoke, according to Halverson.
“They’re babies that already have lung issues and low immune systems,” she told KRTV. “I am worried about them, obviously, but we’re gonna do everything we can and just keep an eye on them.”
The worst of the news may be yet to come, however: officials are still trying to determine if the drugs burned at the right temperature to prevent toxins from being emitted into the air. The shelter employees were tested for exposure, Iffland told the AP, but said he didn’t know the results.
Halverson said that she and the shelter have complained to city officials for years about smoke seeping into their side of the building — and they’ve even had to evacuate the building before.
“I’m super frustrated because I feel like this could have been prevented. We’ve recorded this several times. We have written letters,” Halverson told KRTV. “The fact that it is continuing to happen, and I had 14 staff members exposed to smoke inhalation from methamphetamine, plus all of my animals, is not okay, and it should have been prevented.”
So you might ask: what were these feds and officials smoking? Nothing that came out of the evidence room, we hope.
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