Tainted homes, tainted lives

Unsuspecting people get caught up in fallout of meth production

December 27, 2005

MARY AMES\Frontiersman reporter

When Joanne Konkler saw a man dressed in black and holding a rifle crouched beneath her window back in June, she at first wondered if he was out to get a bear she and her husband had seen in the yard a few days before.

She walked outside to investigate and saw more men with guns, dressed in black, moving around the house. If she tried to go back inside, the man told her, she would be shot.

The cops had arrived. It was Michael Konkler, 33, the cops were after, because he had been cooking meth in a fifth-wheel trailer parked next to his parents' house.

Joanne Konkler said she had to stay outside with her hands in plain sight, again being warned she would be shot if she didn't follow the instructions. She heard a crash at the front door and worried about her husband inside, she said.

Don Konkler, 68, was walking with two canes toward the front door after he heard the knock. He is slowed by two strokes, wears a pacemaker and shows signs of having Alzheimer's disease, according to Joanne.

&#8220When I asked them why they had to break down the front door, they said they had waited until the count of 10,” Joanne Konkler said. &#8220My husband just doesn't move that fast. Mike did wrong, but he told us that he would never have done that in the house, he respects us too much. And he only made a little bit for himself.”

Whether Mike Konkler cooked his little bit of meth in the house or not, his parents' house on Constitution Drive in the Butte is one of eight in the Mat-Su Borough now listed on the Department of Environmental Conservation Web site as contaminated with methamphetamine residue.

Mike Konkler was recently sentenced to five years in prison, with one year suspended, after he pleaded no contest to one count of second-degree misconduct involving a controlled substance. His parents live in a house Joanne Konkler said they had to take off the market after it was listed as meth-contaminated. Living on Social Security, they can't afford to have the home tested to prove it is meth-free, she said.

Michael and Char Rancourt own another property listed on the Web site, on Bluegrass Lane in Wasilla. The Rancourts live next door to the three-bedroom house they were planning on as rental income, Michael Rancourt said. The future rental property was going to be a five-bedroom, 3,000-square-foot house when finished, and Rancourt had a friend living there, working on the house in exchange for rent. Then Rancourt's friend went to work on the North Slope and let another friend, someone Rancourt didn't know, stay there in his absence.

&#8220I think his name was Scott,” Rancourt said. &#8220I was out of town last spring and a cop friend called and asked permission to go in. We'd already got word [from the police] they were looking at it. But we were in and out of there a lot and never smelled anything. He had a big suitcase with a meth lab. Last I heard, he was in jail.”

Cleanup no easy task

Instead of finishing off the rental, Rancourt has spent the last 10 months tearing things out of and cleaning up his property.

&#8220We had to throw away about $5,000 worth of stuff,” Rancourt said. &#8220But it cost more than that for replacements. Insurance doesn't cover it.”

To set his future income property right, Rancourt worked with Mike Anderson, a toxicologist with Environmental Compliance Consultants, an Anchorage firm.

Tweakers - meth addicts - stay up for days using the drug and think of little else, said Anderson, who specializes in cleaning up the messes methheads leave in their wake.

&#8220They're speeding, they're up for days. I don't know why they don't just clean,” he said. &#8220That's how to tell a tweaker from a normal person. A normal person is pushing the cart, a tweaker is taking it apart. They become almost obsessive compulsive about certain things.”

The conditions he encounters at some labs are abominable, he said, and the worst place he's seen was a Willow home he cleaned up earlier this year.

&#8220That's the one with the dog excrement piled on the floor,” he said. &#8220There was garbage, with little trails where they managed to move around the home. I would probably just knock that house down. There was laundry that looked like it hadn't been cleaned in two years. After we got back from the house, I took off everything I was wearing and threw it into the washer, so did the guy that was working with me. It wasn't the chemical residue, it was just the human funk.”

Although making meth from ephedrine might be something anyone can do, cleaning up meth labs is a difficult, time-consuming process.

Anderson admits cooking meth isn't very complicated. By following directions and using the proper ingredients, all of which can be purchased at a hardware store or over the counter at a drug store, almost anyone could cook up a batch of methamphetamine.

&#8220It's a matter of having the ingredients, it's basically a cookbook procedure,” Anderson said. &#8220You can pull recipes right off the Web, you'll find them all misspelled, but they're there. Meth is basically cleaning agents and cold medicine combined to make a new molecule. It's very corrosive stuff that produces eight or nine different chemical wastes.”

Pseudoephedrine, the active ingredient of a cold tablet, is the compound meth-makers are looking for. Cooking meth crystallizes ephedrine.

&#8220Once it volatizes into the air, it gets on the walls while they're cooking it. It's not a closed-loop system when they capture all the gases. Some of their lab equipment includes plastic Sprite bottles - it's not state-of-the-art equipment.”

Since tweakers aren't known for steady hands, it's reasonable to think some of the chemicals could be spilled during production. Once in the air, the chemical gook that isn't breathed into someone's lungs settles onto ceilings, floors, appliances and everything else in the house, and that contamination poses health threats to anyone in the house, through skin contact.

Until February, when the Legislature passed HB 59, there was no mandate for property owners to clean up meth contamination. So meth labs busted in previous years don't make it on the list. Someone may have had them cleaned - or not.

Anderson cleaned up meth labs before the law took effect, he said. His guess was that he had cleaned about 150 sites altogether, and he figured about 35 percent of them were in the Valley.

The Realtors in the Valley are getting up to speed on the situation, according to Uli Johnson, president of the Valley Board of Realtors.

&#8220A lot of members aren't really aware they put themselves in liability and their clients at risk,” Johnson said. &#8220The [DEC] Web site was an eye-opening experience.”

Their January meeting will focus on meth education, Johnson said.

The normal move-out cleaning of a house or apartment doesn't clean the chemical residues left by a meth cook. In fact, it might make the contamination worse.

DEC recommends that no one live in the place until meth contamination is cleaned up. It's illegal to rent it to anyone, but the owners can sell the property if they tell the buyers about the contamination, according to Scot Tiernan, environmental program specialist with DEC.

Potential buyers need to do a really thorough inspection of the property, Tiernan said.

&#8220Look for things that aren't quite right,” he said. &#8220Stains in the sink or bathtub, stains on the walls, or a pink hue on the walls from iodine in the air are warning signs. The drains may be ruined if they poured acid down the drains. There's not a whole lot of thinking going on in these places.”

Tiernan pointed out that some meth labs in the Mat-Su were at hotels.

All the sites listed on DEC's Web site are there because a meth lab was busted there. No one knows where all the labs that were never busted are, but Anderson estimates there are anywhere from 10 to 30 houses out here.

Lessons learned

Tthe Rancourts didn't know as much about meth users and cookers then, but even looking back from a more informed perspective, Char Rancourt said, the signs just weren't there.

&#8220We had confronted him about his past,” Char Rancourt said. &#8220This guy was good, he said he was clean, wanted to stay clean. Think of all the lives he affected. It's just sick. He lived there with his girlfriend, a 2-month-old baby, our friend who let him live there, Daniel, and Daniel's two boys.”

And the man was a nice guy, &#8220damn nice,” according to Char Rancourt.

&#8220He helped me run my Bobcat,” Char Rancourt said. &#8220Just one time I saw him a little jittery and he was wearing sunglasses on a day that wasn't sunny. I just thought he was hungover.”

Because their out-of-pocket rental project looked clean, the Rancourts hoped, as did Anderson, that maybe the cooking didn't really take place there, that the suitcase lab was used only outside the home, as the cooker had said.

But when they had the $1,200 test done, they found out the friend-of-a-friend had cooked upstairs, in the basement, in the kitchen and in the bedrooms. They cleaned in accordance with DEC regulations and tested again. The results came back borderline safe, probably good enough to get the house taken off the DEC Web site, but that wasn't good enough for Char.

&#8220I want zero,” she said. &#8220It's going to be a couple of more months. The thing you want to know is that these chemicals are slowly being absorbed. Having them around is too great a risk and too much a liability, especially in a rental.”

Char Rancourt said that if she were to buy another place in the Valley, she would have it tested for meth residue. And she will never again trade work for rent with anyone. As far as renters, she plans to pay for background checks and look at renting to older people.

&#8220What else are you going to do, pray?” she asked.

Contact Mary Ames at

352-2284 or mary.ames@

frontiersman.com.

www.dec.state.ak.us/spar/perp/meth lab/meth lab_listing.html