Arthur Harwich, who co-owns Weg Industrial Electric on Arrow Highway in Irwindale, remembered going over to the business next door to tell the employees to turn down the loud music, and they did.
He didn’t know what type of business it was, but he did see storage containers.
At nearby Shepherd’s Pantry, volunteers, like Harwich, thought they had smelled marijuana now and then — they thought someone was smoking pot.
“We never associated the smell with the business,” said Frances Gilek, Irwindale warehouse director for Shepherd’s Pantry.
Others thought the place was selling noodles, she added.
On the morning of Oct. 9, a fire broke out at 1404 Arrow Highway and a man engulfed in flames ran out, later dying at a hospital. Authorities found the bodies of three other men inside the warehouse as well as a drug lab.
Weeks later, the tilt-up-construction warehouse, about the height of a two-story building, was still scorched on the outside above a boarded-up doorway. Traffic zipping by was a constant sound. The fire was in one of several businesses in the warehouse, among three such large structures that sit in a triangle formation with a parking lot in the middle.
“It was a large commercial-grade, butane honey oil lab,” said Michael Burke, assistant director of the Los Angeles Interagency Metropolitan Police Apprehension Crime Task Force, or LA IMPACT, a collection of law enforcement agencies with a focus on breaking up drug-trafficking groups. “I would say this is one of the biggest we’ve been to.”
Burke said it is difficult if determine how long the lab on Arrow Highway had been operating: “We’re still at the beginning stages of the investigation.”
Butane is used in the extraction of oil from marijuana plants. It’s not rare for such explosions at honey oil labs, which are furtively tucked into commercial areas and neighborhoods. An open flame, heat or a spark could ignite butane vapors.
In 2020, LA IMPACT responded to 14 butane…
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