Someone thought a motorway bridge near Vianen was the perfect spot for an illegal cannabis operation. They almost got away, until an unexplained electricity bill blew their cover.
Police discovered 180 cannabis plants beneath the Jan Blanken Bridge on the A2 motorway.
They were set up in what Mayor Sjors Fröhlich of the Vijfheerenlanden municipality describes to RTL Nieuws as “some kind of technical room.”
The nursery was deserted when officers arrived.
Hiding in plain sight
The growers had forced their way in through a locked door that had been tampered with repeatedly.
“There are also a lot of young people hanging around, so it could just be some vandalism,” Fröhlich tells RTL Nieuws.
For a spot so tricky to access, an occasional broken lock didn’t warrant a closer look. Little did police know that there were growers with more ambitious plans for a nursery.
The power bill didn’t add up
The national agency responsible for roads and waterways, Rijkswaterstaat, had been struggling to account for an unusually expensive energy bill for quite some time.
A bridge pillar isn’t supposed to draw much power, explains the mayor, yet Rijkswaterstaat’s consumption figures kept climbing.
As it turned out, the grow lights in the nursery were running off a tapped connection — meaning the Dutch state had been unknowingly covering the electricity costs the entire time.
Not long in business
The plants appeared to be a first yield, according to Fröhlich, which suggests that the business endeavour was relatively new.
The 180 cannabis plants have since been destroyed.
No one was present at the time of the discovery, and police are now working through available leads to identify the culprits behind it.
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