Amelia Turse never wanted to own a farm.

But in 1977, her husband, Daniel, was eager to close his shoe repair shop in the San Fernando Valley in Southern California and buy an olive ranch near Reedley in Fresno County. Amelia dutifully went along.

"It made him happy," she recalls, "so what the heck?"

Less than three years later, just as farmland prices began to crash, Daniel died of a heart attack. Unwilling to sell at a loss, Turse spent the next decade renting her 311/2 acres to a succession of deadbeats who stripped the place of everything that wasn't nailed down and some things that were: curtains, screens, fixtures, pumps and motors.

So in 1992, when a man named Antonio Figueroa showed up with an offer to rent the farm, manage its three living units and see to the upkeep, Turse accepted. When he paid the rent on time for the next five years, she rejoiced.

"I thought, 'Gee, I don't even have to do anything any more. I don't have to come up here and scrub and clean up after these idiots.' "

Then in March 1997, she got an inkling as to why. In a barn in the middle of the property, narcotics agents discovered a meth lab that could produce 32 to 40 pounds in a single batch. Based on empty containers and other evidence, they estimated the lab had been in operation for years and had produced more than 700 pounds of meth. After being cut, or diluted, that amount would have a wholesale street value of more than $10 million.

But that wasn't the worst of it as far as Turse was concerned. In the barn's dirt floor was a pit 6 feet deep covered with plywood and a layer of dirt and pierced by a 10-inch-wide PVC pipe. In the pit lay the residue of years of illicit chemistry -- a sludge of caustic lye, red phosphorus, flammable solvents and other chemicals 18 inches deep, seeping into adjacent soil and groundwater.

Only when the narcotics agents were gone did Turse find out whose responsibility it was to clean up the mess.

Hers.

Meth is made from dangerous stuff: Iodine odors are so strong that cleanup crews must wear respirators; the cat-urine smell of acid has been known to trigger seizures; airborne chemicals are powerful enough to eat away the enamel paint on a refrigerator; chemical-soaked walls often look like sponges; and carpets can be so saturated with flammables that friction from walking on them could start a fire.

At lab sites, waste is dumped down sinks, toilets or water wells, contaminating topsoil and water supplies. But the waste trail doesn't end there. Trash bags are left by roadsides for an unwitting person to pick up. Along with the more than 2,000 labs found last year, nearly 400 waste dump sites were discovered.

One pound of meth, it is estimated, produces 5 pounds of toxic waste. And a swamp of regulatory confusion and bureaucratic inertia surrounds its cleanup: Who's responsible, and who's going to pay for it?

When a meth lab is found, which averages once every five hours in California, the state hires toxic-waste cleanup companies to handle the immediate removal of the lab, including visible drugs, chemicals and equipment. This cost California taxpayers $10 million in the 1999-2000 fiscal year.

But the state stops there. For less urgent threats -- ranging from polluted soil and groundwater to contaminated walls and floors -- the legal burden for cleanup lies with the property owner. In many cases, property owners face mandatory cleanup requirements set by health departments. And that can mean big money.

Turse cashed in a retirement fund to pay a contractor's $10,000 bill. She might have to spend much more -- as much as $5 million by one estimate -- to clean up what contamination may linger.

Besides the farm, Turse owns her tract home in Camarillo, about 15 miles east of Ventura, and she has a pension from her 19 years as an admitting nurse at the nearby state hospital. But she doesn't have $5 million, or $500,000, or even $50,000 in ready cash.

Now she worries that regulators, from whom she had heard nothing in more than two years until last July, will reopen her file: "I don't want the health department to know I'm alive."

A bill that would have helped unsuspecting property owners with meth labs on their land, like Turse, was introduced in the Legislature this year -- and went nowhere.

After gutting it, the Senate Committee on Environmental Quality sent Poochigian's proposal to the Appropriations Committee, where it was essentially buried.

Turse's husband had wanted to replace the olive trees on the land with grapes. But he died before the work was finished, burdening his widow with a distant farm she never wanted.

She became an absentee landlord.

First, she hired a real estate agent to manage the place. Soon after, she visited the farm and found chickens walking through the main house. She put the farm up for sale, but the farm economy was sagging and interest was nil. "Basically, all I wanted out of it was what I paid for it, just to get out," she says. "No one offered me anything."

She fired the real estate agent and put ads in the Reedley newspaper to recruit tenants.

Soon, chickens in the house seemed trivial. "People would come and dump stuff on the side where the olive trees were torn out," she says. "We had bedsprings, mattresses -- you name it, it was there."

After a decade of such problems, Antonio Figueroa appeared in 1991 with a proposition: For no charge, he would cut and clear the untended olive trees on the half of the property that Daniel hadn't already cut. Turse accepted.

The next year, after he had finished cutting most of the trees and sold the wood, Figueroa was back with another offer. Would Turse be willing to rent him the entire property to him and let him find tenants for its house and two apartments? They agreed on a price, $975 a month for five years. And for the first time since her husband's death, Turse stopped worrying about the farm.

"The rents came in," she says. "They were due the first, and I got them the first or second or third. I got them within reason. I didn't have to go up there and scrub or clean. They took care of everything."

Chemical stains cover a wall and electrical outlet at a condemned home near Atwater, Merced County, where authorities busted a methamphetamine manufacturing operation. Bee Photographer- Craig Kohlruss

On the Tuesday before Thanksgiving Day 1996, narcotics agents from the Fresno County Sheriff's Department watched two men outside a Raisin City convenience store fill a pickup truck bed with 20-pound bags of ice. When they finished, one went back into the store and came out with a 12-pack of beer and a bottle of soda.

"The quantity of ice purchased was not consistent with the amount of ice necessary for a 12-pack of beer and a 2-liter soda," one agent deadpanned in a subsequent affidavit.

In fact, the detectives strongly suspected the ice was destined for a meth lab, where large amounts of it are used to cool down a chemical reaction that occurs in one step of the cooking process.

After following the truck to a nearby mobile home and watching the place for a few months, agents raided it in March 1997 and collected enough evidence to get a search warrant for another suspected meth lab -- the one on Turse's farm.

Figueroa wasn't there when a meth task force swooped down on the farm. He had checked into the Fresno County Jail one week earlier to serve a two-year sentence for drunken driving and probation violations.

In a back bedroom of the main house, where Figueroa lived, agents discovered a large cardboard box containing a 22-liter glass reaction vessel, a heating mantle and a rheostat -- the basic equipment for a large meth lab.

Agents got Figueroa's keys from his common-law wife, and the keys included those to the barn out back. When they opened the barn door, the smell almost knocked them off their feet.

All around them lay the spoor of illegal drug manufacturing. Cylinders of hydrogen chloride gas, used in the final stage of the process to covert liquid meth to a crystalline powder; more than 200 empty 5-gallon cans of Freon refrigerant, an ozone-destroying chemical that labs use in abundance to separate liquid meth from the chemical soup of the production process; empty bags of caustic soda beads, another chemical used in the separation process; an empty 100-pound cardboard drum of iodine and a full 5-kilogram container of red phosphorus, two chemicals used in the initial reaction that produces meth; and more laboratory glassware.

And in an alcove on the barn's east side, the mysterious pit, its presence betrayed by the 10-inch PVC pipe rising from the floor.

As a result of the raid, Figueroa pleaded no contest to meth-manufacturing charges in January 1998. He was sent to state prison until March 1999, when he was paroled and deported to Mexico, where he remains.

One week after the raid, Turse visited the farm with a Fresno County Health Department inspector. He gave her the bad news -- she was responsible for cleaning up the contamination.

"He was a very nice man," she says. "He was just doing his job. He pointed out certain things to me that needed to be done, and he gave me the name of two people to call about removing the hazardous waste."

She chose Robert Lassotovitch of PARC Environmental in Fresno. A few days later, Lassotovitch took a crew to the site to take soil samples and make plans to map and remove the contamination. A state contractor had hauled away leftover chemicals and dozens of contaminated containers. But the barn still was littered with used rubber gloves, empty caustic soda bags, empty cylinders of hydrogen chloride gas and some 200 empty refrigerant cans. And in the alcove under a low, slanted metal ceiling lay the pit, its cover still not opened, what it contained still a mystery.

"All we knew," Lassotovitch says, "was that we had a 10-inch piece of PVC pipe in the ground. Where it went to, nobody knew. . . . The hole was still covered. The pipe was in place. It stunk to high heaven."

Lassotovitch's crew disassembled the alcove's roof and longest wall, lifted the plywood cover from the pit and found a dense, wet layer of lye, red phosphorus and other chemicals. It had an alkalinity level of 14 -- strong enough to cause serious skin burns on contact.

They tore into the earth with a backhoe and began loading the contaminated soil into a truck for transport to a hazardous waste landfill in Buttonwillow in Kern County. But as they dug, something curious happened. At the base of the hole, an eerie cloud of white vapor formed. Something in the soil -- they never figured out exactly what -- was forming the vapor cloud when it came into contact with air.

Then, as the digging reached 6 feet, an inky black liquid began collecting in a pool at the base of the hole, flowing in from the surrounding soil. It looked as if "the liquid  migrated downward until it hit a layer of hardpan, at which point it started to spread laterally," a health department inspector's report noted.

They never figured out what was in the liquid or how far into the surrounding groundwater it had spread. But it wasn't the first time Lassotovitch had seen that kind of contamination, and that worries him.

"This is my concern, and I don't think anybody's really addressed this," he says. "If we're finding only 5 percent to 10 percent of the clandestine labs, and the other 90 percent to 95 percent are just dumping stuff out there, what's going to happen to our water supply in 10 to 15 years?"

Eventually, Lassotovitch's crew dug up and hauled away 44 cubic yards of contaminated sludge and soil. At his usual rate, the work should have cost $18,000. For Turse, he dropped the price to $10,000.

"You feel for some people, and she was one that I felt for."

Turse's troubles didn't end when Lassotovitch's trucks rumbled away. Because of the possible groundwater contamination, officials from the Central Valley Regional Water Quality Control Board proposed additional tests of the soil and nearby wells. They required Turse to spend an additional $600 on an engineering report and, in January 1998, sent her a letter approving a work plan proposed by the report.

She ignored it. Regulators waited two years before sending out another letter, which reached Turse in mid-July.

"We tried hard to keep the costs down," says Russell Walls, a senior engineer in the board's Fresno office. "It wasn't her fault, but it's the property owner's responsibility, so she's kind of stuck."

Turse hired an attorney who won a $1 million civil judgment against Figueroa for her estimated cleanup costs, but Lassotovitch says the cost might range as high as $5 million if there is widespread groundwater contamination.

She's never collected from Figueroa and knows she never will. Her lawyer proposed rounding up Figueroa's only identifiable assets -- some horses and cattle -- for an auction. But Turse decided against it.

"He said you might be able to get some money back," she says. "There's no point. I don't know what a cow is worth."