UPDATE: According to a press release from the RCIP, the total amount of “vegetable matter resembling ganja“ was 3,367 lbs

A couple days ago, I was talking to my aunt on MSN Messenger who lives in Delta, BC. She told me that Burns' Bog was on fire. My mom also mentioned it in an email later on that day that they came out of a restaurant and there was ash on the car and they thought maybe Mt St Helens erupted again. My buddy Derek also wrote about it on his website a couple days ago as well, so I was pretty well informed about it.

Imagine my shock then when, while driving to work yesterday morning I saw a huge plume of smoke coming from just east of George Town. The smoke and ash were blowing out to sea, but across George Town, the harbor and over the cruise ships. I assumed it was coming from the George Town landfill, which it turned out it was. The huge column of smoke could be seen from pretty much anywhere on the island.

There was a landfill fire a few years ago, that went underground. It took the CI Fire Service days to put it out and a couple weeks to dig out the remaining “hot spots” and extinguish them as well. The smoke and smell were pretty terrible along the Harquail Bypass that runs alongside the dump. Compared to that time, this time the smoke smelled... sweeter.

I just saw the front page of the Cayman Compass this morning, and the lead photo was of a “controlled burning” at the George Town landfill... of one-thousand pounds of confiscated ganja!

We used to tell a funny story (OK, it was funny for the tourists, but it was pretty corny in reality) about the wreck of the Oro Verde, one of the shipwrecks off of Seven Mile Beach. She used to be a drug runner, and when she foundered on the reef, the RCIP confiscated tons of marijuana off it, took it out to East End and burnt it. The prevailing winds here are east-to-west, so as the urban legend went, the island was covered by a thick cloud of pot smoke (much like the Mighty Weed scene in Mel Brooks' $imdb(History Of The World)) and that's one of the reasons that it still to this day takes so long to get a burger at Burger King.

Whether that was true or not, no one knows (or really cares) but this time, it was for-damn-sure real. The Cayman Compass doesn't update their daily stuff on their website til later in the day, so make sure you check it out later to read it for yourself.