Mr. Sims Scores Humboldt’s Pictures
Skippy Massey
Humboldt Sentinel
It’s shocking.
In the 35-picture series of Goodbye, Mom and Pop: 35 Large-Scale Grow Operations in the North Coast Backwoods, Hank Sims and Kym Kemp of the Lost Coast Outpost have definitively shown marijuana’s destructively growing impact in Humboldt County for the first time. It’s a major photo score of what’s taking place in our backyard when folks get footloose, fancy free, and, well, grossly greedy.
Obtained from law enforcement sources, the Lost Coast Outpost’s photographic slide show illustrates what some cannabis cultivators are doing while underscoring what’s also taking place: logging clearcuts, illegal road building and unpermitted structures, water diversions, and the like. Please, people. If you’re going to be clandestinely illegal, at least be ethically upright.
Understand, each of the 35 pictures appear to be of a separate grow op. Multiply this by thirty-fold and you get an idea of what’s really been going on behind the scenes.
Some things the pictures can’t show are the greedy grower’s dirty little weed secrets: water diversions sucked up from local sources, the loss of wildlife, diesel and chemical spills, and the fertilizer, pesticide, and silt runoff slipping into the nearby creeks, rivers, and watersheds.
Mr. Sims writes:
The Lost Coast Outpost recently acquired a set of images from the Humboldt County Drug Task Force that sort of shakes us out of this stupor. These are aerial photos of grow scenes throughout the North Coast that were taken between 2009 and 2011. These seem all to be on private land in the boondocks, and the scale of operations they depict are sometimes hard to credit. Many of them depict illegal grading, massive landscaping and/or tree-falling, and voracious water usage. The Aquarian live-lightly-on-the-land ethos seems to have bypassed these types entirely.
We suggest giving the photographs a look here if you haven’t done so already. With 179 comments, the issue has generated a fair amount of controversy across the board from different sides of the Humboldt spectrum.
As Mr. Sims said, “Holy moly, but some of these things are huge.”
Photo credit: Lost Coast Outpost
Some of those photos are terribly shocking. I can’t take any credit however. Hank is responsible for the entire piece.
Has anyone figured out where these grows get the water? There is a big problem in Garberville right now, that between the Garberville Sanitary District (GSD) and the Benbow Water Company, they are diverting and selling millions of gallons from the South Fork Eel River illegally every week to water delivery truck companies, which then deliver and sell that trucked water to people living in other watersheds that have no or very low flows in their rivers, creeks and streams. This has been increasing for years.
Garberville Sanitary District received a violation letter from the Department of Water Rights, stating GSD was selling water outside their permitted place of use, which is only for the town of Garberville. So who is doing wrong by this, the growers or the public water company the provides the water illegally. The Redway Community Services District has not sold bulk water outside the town of Redway since August 2008 for these very reason and more.
At the August 28th 2012 GSD Public Board meeting, this letter from Division of Water Rights was addressed, but the bottom line from the GSD Board was to keep selling bulk water as long as possible, because it was $20,000 profit per year. What the GSD Board didn’t want to talk about, was that this water was purchased from a Fire Hydrant in town on the “Honor System”. That’s right, the water delivery companies pump an unlimited amount of ‘un-metered” water into their delivery trucks every day and tell GSD how much water they took. And we all know how great the “Honor System” works in a outlaw, black-market and underground community, right?
What is not being said is that if you own the property and you are planning on building a house such as the picture above you MUST create a 100 foot defensible space around the structure. So what is illegal about that? What a slanted article. It seems these people like to grow and used their defensible space for that. I feel that it would be wrong to cut back a space strictly for marijuana if it’s not your land or on public property. Catch 22 ask any CDF personnel if you should maintain your structure with all vegetation removed 100 feet around. This article plays are environmentalists hearts while not giving the picture. Private land has certain exemptions and needs to maintain a safe household. Also a lot of private land owners tap wells.