Via KTVQ:

The city government of Billings, Montana has its own incinerator; it’s mostly used for disposing of animal carcasses, but the local police also use it weekly to dispose of drugs (that they no longer need to hold onto as evidence, I guess). They’ve been doing this for decades.

Billings is not exactly a mega-metropolis, so a week’s worth of seized drugs is a small amount of drugs.

There’s also an animal shelter that rents space from the city in the same building, and for years now, they’ve been complaining about the smell.

The shelter staffers especially disliked the smell when the incinerator is burning “chemicals,” maybe because they’re in an animal shelter and unfazed by organic smells, like burning roadkill. But even the chemicals hadn’t been more than a nuisance, apparently, or at least not enough of a problem to risk annoying the landlord-who’s-also-the-city-government with too much complaining.

Then one day – it was Wednesday again, actually, a busy news day – the FBI wanted to borrow the incinerator to dispose of two pounds of meth.

Two pounds of meth is not a small amount of drugs. The smoke was visible. And it was somehow in the building.

Hospitalizations ensued. I don’t know at time of writing about the effect on the animals, but it was probably nothing good.

But how was the smoke in the building?

According to [some guy from City Hall] a “negative air pressure issue” caused smoke to backdraft into the shelter. He said that the problem lay not with the incinerator itself, but with the negative pressure it creates in the building, which is what sucked the tainted smoke into the shelter.

…and the FBI guys standing around the incinerator, what happened to them? And shouldn’t the incinerator have been running hot enough to break the meth down into less dangerous chemicals? Isn’t that the whole point of chemical incineration?

And shouldn’t the drugged smoke have been released at chimney height, too high for “negative pressure” to suck it back inside? How tall is the chimney on that incinerator, anyway? Checking Google Street View…

Oh. If the “incinerator” even has a chimney, it’s too small to be visible…. or is that… that little white thing, above the parked cop car in the picture, maybe a foot high, is that it? Or does it vent into the building’s internal HVAC, and the city didn’t have a problem with that until now because the couple of dime bags the cops took off Little Jimmy last week don’t make much more than an odd smell?

…the shelter shared an HVAC system with the incinerator.

(I live in a town where a cigar store had to increase its chimney height because a neighboring pizza joint complained. And where the local trash incinerator looks like this.)

I’m tempted to snark about the Billings “incinerator” being a fucking cast-iron wood stove, but I grew up with one of those and know they have actual chimneys. They might burn hotter, too.

And this story went international – here’s the BBC’s take, for example – because it (1) is horrific (those poor kittens!) and (2) engendered a lot of “lol FBI sux” reactions on social media.

But while the FBI does often and thoroughly suck, this incident’s culprits are smaller in scale.

Billings City Hall’s denizens will have to talk very fast.