Record pot grow busted in Burbank

BURBANK -- A massive marijuana grow operation said to be the largest ever found in Washington was discovered and dismantled in a commercial tree farm east of Burbank.

More than 40 officers from 15 agencies spent two days harvesting about 70,000 plants ranging in size from 6 inches to nearly 7 feet tall, Walla Walla County Sheriff Mike Humphreys said Thursday.

After adding the plants found this week to the nearly 40,000 plants found in the same tree farm last month, Humphreys said they harvested in all 110,264 pot plants.

"It's the most ever found in one grow in one place" in the state, said Lt. Rich Wiley, the narcotics section commander for the Washington State Patrol.

The estimated street value of the plants is more than $200 million, Humphreys said. That's using a conservative estimate that each plant is worth about $2,000 each, he said, but it could actually be as high as $5,000 a plant.

"We think we've hit them hard by what we've taken out of here," Wiley said. "Hopefully they won't come back next year."

Humphreys said the operation was likely the work of a Mexican drug cartel. No arrests were made this week, but agents arrested three suspects in connection with the marijuana found growing at the same complex last month.

The company that operates the tree farm has no involvement in the illegal operation, said officials. Once the trees are planted they are watered and fertilized automatically and left alone to grow until they are harvested for paper products.

Using the tree farm for the grow operation is a new trend this year, but not surprising, Wiley said.

Last year, the marijuana eradication teams found large growing operations in vineyards in the Yakima Valley and the first ever in a national park in the North Cascades, he said.

Using the 20,000-acre tree farm provides a perfect cover for the growers because it's hard to spot the plants growing among the 30-foot-tall poplar trees, Humphreys said.

Sgt. Gary Bolster, a Walla Walla County sheriff's detective in charge of the South East Washington Narcotics Team, pointed out how difficult it is to see the plants planted about 2 miles deep in one part of the tree farm.

The plot was only two rows wide and 20 trees deep, but it could hardly be seen because of the heavy underbrush.

"It's like finding a needle in a haystack, literally," Humphreys said.

The underbrush is so thick, only about three rows of trees can be seen to each side. If someone was standing four rows away, no one would know.

That's also what makes finding a grow operation in a setting like that so dangerous, Bolster said. Many times, growers are armed with guns, so in the tree farm, they'd be able to see the officers before the officers knew they were there.

In the area shown to reporters Thursday, two strings ran along both sides of the 20 trees to help keep the marijuana plants growing upward. The tree farm has irrigation drip lines that run along the trees, providing fertilized water to both the legal and illegal plants.

The two-row garden Bolster walked through is about 1/50th the size of the other gardens that detectives have found in other areas of the tree farm, he said.

Some were as large as 60 rows wide and 120 trees deep. Two campsites were also found in bigger plots, leaving authorities to suspect two or four growers were likely living there.

A helicopter flew over the farm two days ago looking for more plants, and detectives think the growers were scared off then.

After last month's bust, detectives with the South East Washington Narcotics Team, including sheriff's deputies from Walla Walla, Garfield and Columbia counties, searched the farm for more illegal plants.

They found several and set up surveillance, trying to catch the growers in the act. Detectives used ATVs, aircraft and even went through the trees on foot.

"It's such a vast area and we have limited resources," Humphreys said. "It's time consuming to do surveillance on all this."

It's early in the eradication season, which runs until October in the Tri-Cities and Walla Walla regions, but Humphreys said they decided to go in and pull the plants now because "we wanted to get to it first before the bad guys got to it."

Some plants still were being cultivated, but some were about two weeks away from being harvested, Bolster said. The grow likely was planted as early as late March or early April.

Several agencies and teams are in the area for the annual marijuana eradication for Southeast Washington, so the sheriff said they wanted to take advantage of the extra help. Officers harvested 52,250 plants Wednesday and about 25,000 Thursday.

Agencies participating in the bust are the Washington State Patrol, Drug Enforcement Agency, sheriff's offices in Benton, Franklin, Garfield, Columbia, Grant, Kittitas, Snohomish, Clark, Spokane and Skagit counties, the state Department of Fish & Wildlife and the Washington National Guard.

So far this year, more than 200,000 plants have been found in various grow operations -- the Burbank operation makes up about half of what's been found.

Last year, about 580,000 marijuana plants were harvested statewide by law enforcement officers before the growers could get it on the streets.

-- Paula Horton: 509-582-1556; phorton@tricityherald.com