Hotel Evacuated After Meth Lab Found

Police evacuated dozens of guests and employees from a La Palma hotel Tuesday morning after the discovery of a drug laboratory in one of the top-floor rooms.

The manager of the La Quinta Inn received an anonymous tip about the lab Tuesday morning and called police. Officers and firefighters entered the seventh-floor room to find an ether-like odor and a yellow haze filling the room. They also found cooking equipment and chemicals used for the production of the drug methamphetamine.

Police quickly evacuated about 100 guests and alerted the bomb squad because drug labs are sometimes booby-trapped to fend off outsiders. The chemicals involved also pose a high risk of explosion, Lt. Mark Yokoyama said. No injuries were reported.

Police later said they were stunned by the 10 a.m. discovery.

“We’ve seen nothing of this magnitude in La Palma before,” said Yokoyama, adding that most methamphetamine busts within the city involve small home laboratories. “Usually, we see more of the stove type of operations.”

It is believed that the suspected drug manufacturers moved into the room Sunday night. Police would reveal little more about their investigation, except to say they were reviewing the hotel’s security-camera tapes in an effort to identify them.

Some people were amused by it all, but many guests were impatient to return to their rooms.

“People were laughing in the office,” said Valerie Payne, an account supervisor whose company moved into the office building across the street from the hotel just last week. “A meth lab right here on Center Point Drive.”

Rhonda Smith, a Texas woman on vacation with her two teenage daughters, was irritated at being kept out of their room.

“It’s definitely a nuisance,” Smith said as she waited outside. “We just came back from the mall, and all our things are still inside. It seems like a real nice hotel, but then you never know. Where we’re from, they do that kind of thing in old, abandoned houses.”

“I was looking out of the window, and I saw the roadblocks and the firetrucks coming,” said Ley Bolinger, a minister whose hotel room was a few doors down from the drug lab. “Initially, I thought it was a bomb scare, but when I came out of the room, I saw the police going through, room by room.”

Police agreed that the hotel was an unusual location for a meth lab. “It’s a nice, $50- to $60-a-night hotel, primarily with a corporate clientele,” Yokoyama said.