Cocaine Worth IDR 24.6 Billion Stranded Along Florida Coast After Debby Storm

Evidence of drugs that have been secured. (Facebook/Collier County Sheriff's Office)

JAKARTA - Cocaine worth about 1.6 million US dollars or around Rp. 24,641,920,000 was found along the Florida coast, after Hurricane Debby hit the area earlier this month.

Authorities said Hurricane Debby not only left traces of deadly damage, but also more than 100 pounds of narcotics.

On August 4, 25 packages of cocaine were found on a beach in Islamorada, a village in Florida Keys about 80 miles from Key West, according to a social media post from Customs and US Border Patrol in Miami.

A kind Samaria told authorities after finding the packages, which weighed about 70 pounds and contained cocaine with an estimated selling value on the market of more than $1 million, the agency said.

Samuel airing, acting head of patrol agent from the Miami sector of the US Border Patrol, shared a photo on X, showing a large number of drugs seized.

A week later, Sheriff's Office Collier County said another number of cocaine worth more than half a million dollars was found floating near Everglades City, in the Gulf of Mexico.

Sheriff Collier County Kevin Rambosk praised Samariaan sailors for reporting narcotics they found floating in mangrove forests off the coast of Panther Key, the agency said in an upload on Facebook.

The sailors discovered what was later known as 56 pounds of cocaine wrapped in a package the size of a microwave oven. The package contains 25 kilograms of cocaine wrapped one by one, according to the Collier County Sheriff's Office, with a selling value estimated at around $625.000.

"We appreciate the help of the kind Samaria sailors in our community who saw something unusual and contacted law enforcement," Rambosk said in the post.

The cover-up of the package shows the package has been in the water for some time, authorities said.

"The discovery reminds us of the smuggling of'square groupers' marijuana in Collier County in the 1970s and 1980s, but is rarely found today," the Facebook post said.

The term "square grouper" is a slang language used to describe bales of marijuana wrapped in plastic because it looks like a square fish, Brian Townsend, a special supervisory agent who has retired from the Narcotics Enforcement Agency, told CNN.

"During the 1970s and 1980s, drug smugglers usually wrapped marijuana in this way to transport it from the Caribbean and South America to Florida and other coastal areas," Townsend said.

According to authorities, Sheriff's Office investigator Collier County and narcotics bureau and his deputy are working to determine where the drugs came from.

"The detectives said cocaine was most likely carried away by the ups and downs of the east coast due to the recent storm," the post wrote.

"Major packages of drugs ranging from marijuana to cocaine to cocaine have been found floating in waters off the coast of Miami and Florida Keys," he continued.

He explained that drug smugglers often use boats, submarines, and other ships to transport drugs to the US by sea and can dispose of drugs in the water to avoid confiscation if their ships experience problems such as mechanical damage, bad weather to ambushes by law enforcement, according to Townsend.

He said he often saw drugs stranded along the South Texas coastline along the Gulf Coast during one of his DEA duties in the past.

"Several smugglers deliberately dropped the bale-ball of drugs wrapped in plastic or watertight containers into the sea at a designated location to be taken later by other smugglers," said Townsend.

Once in the water, ocean currents and ups and downs especially during storms like Debby can take drugs to the beach that is far from their original disposal site, he said.