-from kimatv.com-

By Robin Woodson

ZILLAH/OUTLOOK — “That’s too many plants, like you said 10,000, that’s way too many, yeah, no, that’s scary,” Zillah resident, Celso Alvarez, said.

For neighbors along East Zillah and Dekker Road, a pretty big pot bust Thursday afternoon, is something the town rarely hears about.

“it’s just a shock, it’s wow, it’s a really big surprise,” Teodora Martinez-Chavez, who lives on Dekker Road, said.

When asked, “You never would of suspected something like that was going on?”

Alvarez replied, “No, no, no, I mean this area, no.”

The Law Enforcement Against Drugs Task Force, or L.E.A.D, got a tip about a cornfield in the area with more than 10,000 pot plants in the ground.

“That’s a lot of drugs on the street,” Alvarez added.

Detectives also say the illegal plants had a street value of about $10 million bucks.

“Definitely concerned that people that were willing to do that on such a high scale live so near us,” Martinez-Chavez said.

But what’s an even scarier sight for residents, is not being able to tell exactly which field the crop came from.

Most tell Action News, it’s too early in the season for corn and there’s not many fields around right now.

Since most farmers just started planting them.

“We don’t have a place, I mean you can see it, it’s open land,” Alvarez said.

“It makes me feel, personally, that I guess I didn’t know my neighbors quite as well as I thought I did,” Martinez-Chavez said.