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For a second day, police are working on destroying what has turned out to be a massive marijuana growing operation in the mountains east of Ephraim in Sanpete County. So far, more than 23,000 plants have been seized, but there are three other areas still left for officers to clear.
It's a bust that has kept tens of millions of dollars of pot from ever reaching the streets.
Deputies from the Sanpete County Sheriff's Office, the Central Utah Narcotics Task Force, the DEA and other officers are taking out thousands and thousands of marijuana plants. Sgt. Greg Peterson, with the Sanpete County Sheriff's Office, said, "They are still walking around trying to find more areas. They came upon another base camp this morning, have cleared that to make sure no one else is around. They continue to find more and more areas."
Deer hunters found the pot farm this weekend, leading to the arrest of two suspects. Now agents are quickly destroying their crop of pot that had been cultivated for months. "It appears they have been working this all summerlong," Peterson said. "They have continued to work it until now, until the deer hunters came up on them. They were actually drying some out, trying to harvest it."
The marijuana was being sprayed for bugs and was being fertilized with garden-type fertilizer, and it had a network of irrigation piping, which was getting water from a nearby spring. Peterson said, "What they've done is a gravity-flow piping system and brought it down, used RainBirds, other things like that to water the plants and just tons and tons of pipe going through this area."
A helicopter lifted load after load of marijuana plants off of the mountain, where it was loaded onto a dump truck to be hauled away and destroyed. Crews are hauling out the plants to a location where the marijuana is being buried.
Investigators already have two suspects and, because it is such a big operation, believe others may be involved.
They expect it may take another day or two to get all of the marijuana off of the mountain.
E-mail: spenrod@ksl.com
