From the nctimes.com:
San Diego County officials, who took the lead on the operation because the property is in an unincorporated county pocket, maintain that the materials posed a threat to the surrounding neighborhood.
That may be so. But Steven A. McKinley, the owners’ San Diego attorney, said it doesn’t get the county off the hook for compensating his clients. He said their loss is at least $500,000, when the home’s value, and his clients’ distress and inconvenience, are factored in.
“We do not believe an emergency existed within the meaning of those cases which allow a taking without compensation,” McKinley said in a Dec. 15 e-mail to Thomas Bunton, a senior deputy county counsel.
That e-mail, and one from McKinley to Bunton on Dec. 8, were included in the county’s claims files. A county response attached to McKinley’s e-mails was redacted. In the Dec. 8 e-mail, the day before the burn, McKinley said the owners would drop the claim if the county agreed to buy the property for $494,000 and pay other related costs.
Bunton said by phone on Tuesday that the county has not officially responded to the claim or met with the claimants, but plans “a timely response.” He said the county would provide an unredacted e-mail response at a later date.
“Our legal position is that we believe that there’s no compensation requirement here,” Bunton said. “This was exigent circumstances. It was an emergency.” A county spokesman said in December that the county was not obligated to compensate the owner because the “home is being destroyed to protect the public health and safety.”
The home’s renter, George Jakubec, was jailed Nov. 18, 2010, after a landscaper was injured in an explosion at the house. Jakubec has pleaded not guilty to federal bombmaking and bank robbery charges.
He remains in federal custody without bail.
I’m hoping the Homeowners win. Complete over reaction by the county.
Can they pocket the money and let the bank foreclose?
$500k seems like a cheap price for such extraordinary circumstances. How much has this situation cost, already? Just pay it.
Send them a bill for the removal of a public nuisance.
Say the city had decided to pass on cleaning up and sent the landlord a clean up order. What would a private hazmat company charged the landlord for their services?
BTW, Do landlords really not ever check their properties?
I’m not sure how I feel about this one. The home owners probably deserved to be compensated up to some point. Maybe the county pays the balance of the loan.
That said it’s starting to get a little old that the tax payer is suppose to ride to the rescue every time somebody makes a bad decision. There should be at least a little blame to the homeowners for having absolutely no idea about the type of person they were renting to or what was going on in the house. Of course that opens a whole can of worms in which renters would possibly lose privacy rights as landlords regularly invade renter privacy because they’re now on the hook for what their renters do in the property, although that might already be the law.
can they make an insurance claim?
I thought the owner of the house was the estranged wife of the renter. She knew or should have known what the guy was doing in the house.
Any idea how much debt/equity was in that house……or who the lender was. Odds seem low it was a high equity home.
She paid $479,000 in March 2005, and financed 100%.
She refinanced 10 months later with two loans, totalling $490,500, with Homecomings.
Jenae’s flipper has the same model next door listed for $349,000. He paid $221,500 in June, 2010.
So they are begging to get the loan repaid as they are 200k underwater. That fire was the best escape route she could have imagined….bank will sell the lot for $100k and release her and be done with it.
100k lot plus $200k +\- to build seems around the 300k value of a 2,200 sf house over there considering all the factors and comp/listing referenced by JTR.
Need free money in the 21st century?
Load up your house with old people or munitions…
Bressi bomb factory???? Collect rent, don’t pay the mtg, lease to bombers, burn and repeat…
Every delivery boy who comes to nail the NOD to the door gets blown up in the front yard.
If they can’t serve ya, they can’t foreclose ya.
“Send them a bill for the removal of a public nuisance”
It remains to be proven that the house WAS a public nuisance. There was a negligible amount of explosives inside the house. County sheriff went with the most expensive way possible to get rid of those, and stuck the owner with a bill.
“BTW, Do landlords really not ever check their properties?”
No, they don’t. Renters have a legally protected right not to be disturbed within their houses. As long as the renter pays his rent, the landlord is not supposed to go inside.
I was actually surprised that they burned the house. I didn’t see it as the ‘safe’ way. The reason is because some types of explosives used for ‘detonation’ (primary explosives) will actually explode when they get hot (like from a fire). This is the reason why shells (bullets still mounted in their casings – including the propellant) will ‘go off’ when put in a fire or oven (queue Discovery and Mythbusters). The primer cap in the back of the shell contains a primary explosive.
Primary explosives are very sensitive to shock, vibration… and heat. One of the most effective ways to disable them is to get them wet (particularly if they are a ‘dry’ or ‘powder’ form). Very few primary explosives can function when wet.
ucodegen,
Yes, but getting secondary explosives wet often will leach hazardous chemicals.
What to do, what to do?
I guess burn it seemed like the easiest way. They better hope they had some experts advise them with lawyers in the room.
That said, it’s probably cheaper to settle for some amount that lets the owner off the hook, but not give them a free lot.
HMTD and PETN are are insoluble in water. PETN loses its explosive ability when wet, but HMTD does not.
The stated reason for burning was that the house was cluttered and the bomb disposal robot couldn’t even get to the explosives, and they did not want humans inside the house.
Actually, the smart thing for them do (and the cheapest) would be to simply rebuild the house with the exact same floor plan and exactly same level of materials (ie – no granite and stainless kitchen if one wasn’t there before.)
Then let the owner re-rent it out.
secondary explosives can be handled relatively safely.. and dropped w/o them going off. Which secondary explosive are you thinking of that leaches hazardous chemicals? PETN doesn’t, TNT doesn’t, nitro-glycerine is oil based, RDX, Semtex are both PETN based and have plasticisers added to make them ‘plastic’ explosives (non-soluble in water). One of the ‘desensitizers’ used for explosives in liquid form is diatomaceous earth (also used in pool filters). PETN is supposedly the explosive that the guy was making. PETN can be safely lit and burned, though if there is also a primary explosive near where the burn was occurring, it can cause the PETN to explode when it explodes.
For the gardener to get injured by ‘stepping’ on something, there had to be some sort of ‘initiator’ or contact explosive — if it was PETN that exploded.
HMTD is a primary explosive and is very sensitive to heat..
Yes, it is. The gardener was injured by stepping on a jar filled with HMTD. Hazmat teams reportedly removed about 9 pounds of HMTD, unknown quantities of PETN and ETN, and 50 pounds of hexamine (the precursor of HMTD). So this guy was mostly into primary explosives. County officials either don’t know how much explosives were still left in the house, or they aren’t saying.
uummmm….what do you guys do for work?
County officials either don’t know how much explosives were still left in the house, or they aren’t saying.
I think it is a little of both. Considering that it largely ‘burned’ and not ‘exploded’ (1 lb of HMTD does not make a little ‘pop’), even thought the guy was focused on primary explosives, makes me think that there weren’t many explosives in the house.
Ummmmm.. can’t say, other than I work for a military contractor.
One thing that always amazes me is how Law Enforcement always think they are the expert on all things dangerous (fire, explosives, weapons – you name it), when in reality there are people you pass on the street who may know volumes and L.E. is comparably functionally illiterate on the subject. Of course, it is not a good idea to correct L.E. on said subject because you may end up running into superego problems.
I am not one for lawsuits, but if I were the landlord, if my insurance company refused to pay the claim, then you can bet I would be doing the same thing. It is not at all unreasonable–okay deduct the cost of say $20K for a hazmat clean-up!
“1 lb of HMTD does not make a little ‘pop’”
Make that 10 lbs. For all its sensitivity, HMTD is not particularly powerful. Energy density is lower than TNT and the detonation velocity is quite a bit lower. Back in 2005 terrorists blew up a bus in London with 10 lbs of TNT. There certainly weren’t that many explosives in the bomb house. There could’ve been 1 or 2 pounds.
Make that 10 lbs. For all its sensitivity, HMTD is not particularly powerful.
True.. but I was not looking for a big bang. I was referring to the little pops heard when the house was burning.
ucodegen,
I cannot hold a candle to that, but I had understood that nearly all manufactured explosives have “pinkwater” wastes.
http://www.globalsecurity.org/military/systems/munitions/explosives-env.htm
I am no expert, but had only understood that from my sister who works in munitions destruction. I guess I learned something today.
Chuck
“nearly all manufactured explosives have “pinkwater” wastes.”
Sure. TNT, for example, is ALMOST unsoluble in water. “ALMOST” means one part of TNT per 6000 parts of water. In other words, you would almost surely die of TNT poisoning if you were to drink 100 gallons of TNT-saturated water at once. You would eventually start seeing health effects on your liver and kidneys if you drank half a gallon of pinkwater a day for many years.
It is a concern if you’re running a large-scale explosives manufacturing/handling operation. It is not a big deal if you just need to soak a single cache of explosives.
If the owner had stockpiled the explosives, I would have a different opinion, but since it was a renter I do feel bad for the owner. If he couldn’t check up on the renter and could not legally discriminate even if he thought the renter had mental issues, then it seems like his hands were tied. It seems like he is suing for just the loan balance. If his homeowners insurance is not liable to pay (due to an exclusion for criminal/law enforcement action), then I think he is entitled to sue and seek redress from the agency that made his home inhabitable/unsellable. Once the agency pays the bank off…then they should own the property and could either build a house and sell it or sell the empty lot to recoup some of their money.
When local law enforcement chose to burn the house to save money and time, I hope they factored in the cost of buying the house in their calculations.
It is a concern if you’re running a large-scale explosives manufacturing/handling operation. It is not a big deal if you just need to soak a single cache of explosives.
I love this blog…
If you look at it from the County’s point of view–$500K is roughly 13cents per resident–I’ll kick in my 13cents!
I still say they should just rebuild the house as it was. The owners don’t deserve a $500k bailout for being dumb enough to buy in 2005 and then refi out again later. Just rebuild the house and everybody is happy.
Re #25. It was said that they checked with federal officials, and likley also the military before hand. If you combine the ATF and the military who else would know as much? (These agencies may also have checked with black agencies that uses these things as well)
It’s been about 20 years since I last held an explosives handling certificate, but based on the descriptions and photos of the interior of the home, I’d say there was no reasonably safe way for people to enter it and attempt to remove the explosives, and no way to ever be certain that all potentially explosive or toxic contamination had been removed without gutting the structure to the studs. If this place had been industrial, it probably would have qualified as an EPA Superfund site. Permanent red-tagging, followed by a hazmat demolition and removal of the structure and a topsoil scraping that would have cost at least $1M was the inevitable alternative to burning in place.
It’s a mistake to call the burning of the house its destruction; this structure had already been rendered permanently uninhabitable by the contamination. The county saved the owners or their insurance company a ton of money by clearing the environmental barriers and burning it to consume the explosives.
If the owners satisfied all their legal responsibilities as landlords and properly managed it within the limits of the law, the county should attest to the fact that the structure would never have been clearable for use again and the owners’ insurance should cover the replacement cost (assuming that the owners have the usual replacement policy).
Based on reports of the owners’ mortgage/s and the probable value of the house if it was rebuilt by insurance, I’d say they’re hoping for a county bailout of their underwater mortgages.
the lease said that the guy could run an ‘explosive factory’…
It was said that they checked with federal officials, and likley also the military before hand.
Ummmmm, I think you put too much credit in the coordination and intelligence of Law Enforcement.
Ever heard that the C.I.A. is a contradiction of terms?
You really want military ordinance disposal.. not ATF. The explosives involved are a little out of the ordinary and generally more related to military explosives (except HDPN which really has no use because PETN is more stable and can be set off with a sufficiently strong spark.). Most military grade explosives are based on either RDX or PETN. On the other hand military ordinance disposal would have experience with HDPN if they came off rotation from any of the gulf wars.
As “Nameless” also mentioned, this guy seemed to have interest in ‘primary’ explosives and not ‘secondary’ explosives. You don’t want to set fire to anything containing ‘primary’ explosives. This is more likely to cause an explosion than to have it burn off harmlessly. This guys interest in ‘primary’ explosives and the amount he had tends to indicate to me that he was stupidly messing around. You want as little primary explosive around as possible (and don’t keep the primary explosives in large amounts nor anywhere near secondary explosives).
Secondary explosives are where the ‘power’ in a explosive device is and they ‘tend’ to be more stable than primaries. If he was making devices for use, I would have expected to see more of this stuff. The naming of primary and secondary has nothing to do with importance. It has to do with the order within an explosive device. It ‘tends’ to take a lot of energy to set of high explosives (or at least those that would be stable enough to be ‘useful’). The initiating action is usually weak, so the initiating action sets off a small amount of primary explosive with provides sufficient energy to touch off the secondary. Take a bullet/casing in a handgun. The firing pin strikes the primer which then sets off the main charge – driving the bullet down the barrel. The primer contains a small amount of ‘primary’ explosive.
“Ummmmm, I think you put too much credit in the coordination and intelligence of Law Enforcement.”
I suspect that in this case the motivator for seeking outside advice was fear. Much more persuasive than inter-agency cooperation goals.
Hey, the home owner is the victim here. The detained suspect may have turned the house into the bomb house.
“Hey, the home owner is the victim here. The detained suspect may have turned the house into the bomb house.”
The owner is obviously a victim but do they have a right to be made whole at the expense of the taxpayer. If a contractor rips off a home owner during a remodel the home owner can go after the contractor but can’t go after the taxpayer. Obviously the county government decided to burn the home down citing public safety but really were just shifting the owner loss to the taxpayers loss. If the owner wins we effectively are all victims instead of just the homeowner being a victim.
The state does maintain a fund to help compensate victims of violent crimes, but even if bombmaking qualifies, the fund would most likely not pay out for loss of income property. But again, loss of use took place when the home was contaminated, not when it was burned. Insurance should cover replacement minus deductible, which would probably still leave the owners with an underwater mortgage.
I need to archive this discussion. 🙂