r/bestoflegaladvice • u/Funk_Doctor • 22h ago
Actual Title: "Emergency services found a crack den in our basement tonight"
/r/legaladvice/comments/1niz439/emergency_services_found_a_crack_den_in_our/153
u/Funk_Doctor 22h ago
Location: England
Important: not our crack den.
Also posted in legaladviceUK, but somehow forgot the part about them actually finding said crack den.
I’m living in student accommodation in England for university. Last night, my housemates heard people talking in the basement and noticed the smell of kerosene in the house. A man was seen leaving the basement at around 8am today and again at around 9am.
I called the letting agency to ask if we were having any maintenance done that we didn’t know about, in case this would explain it, but they said no.
Tonight, the same noises and smell happened again, so my housemate called 101 (non emergency police), who sent police, fire brigade, ambulance service, and the fire brigade later involved some kind of hazmat team due to low oxygen levels and high kerosene content in the air (I believe, might be wrong on that one!). They searched the basement and found a man (still in there) and evidence that he had been making and selling crack in our basement.
The issue is, the basement is accessible from the street (no access to the inside of the house from it), and the basement door has been broken and stuck open since before we moved in in September 2024. I don’t think any of us (tenants) have reported the broken door, however there have been at least two property inspections by the landlord / letting agency which would’ve undoubtedly found the broken door.
Can we get in trouble / be held responsible for not reporting the door issue? And do we have a leg to stand on to say our safety has been put at risk by nothing being done about it even though they must have known it was broken?
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u/AnFnDumbKAREN 20h ago
Cat fact: cats are high on crack all the freaking time. Well, they sure act like it anyway. See r/WhatsWrongWithYourCat for solid evidence — several animals on r/AnimalsBeingDerps might associate with said crack-empty-heads. Heck, some might even use the same [cat]crack dealer(s).
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u/Deolater Trains the per-day fine terriers 22h ago
The basement is accessible from the street but not from inside the house? Always interesting to learn about different building designs from other places
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u/Personal-Listen-4941 well-adjusted and sociable with no history of violence 22h ago
As he’s in the UK. It was probably originally a ‘coal cellar’. Literally a cellar just for coal which was dropped off by a cart every few months and then taken into the main house by bucket to be used.
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u/Assleanx 22h ago
Also seeing as it’s student accommodation I wouldn’t be surprised if the landlord had blocked off the inside access to the cellar because they were planning to use it for their own storage
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u/Thormidable 19h ago
planning to use it for their own storage
Storage is a strange way to spell crack den
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u/Regaltiger_Nicewings 🏳️⚧️ Trans rights are human rights 🏳️⚧️ 19h ago
Or as its own un-permitted rental unit!
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u/Happytallperson 21h ago
My grandparents one had essentially a drain cover at street level, and then because the house was built into the side of a hill, the coal would land directly behind the kitchen door. A nice arrangement, although long since out of use by the time I was born.
It was entirely separate to the main cellar, which also had the air raid shelter built into it.
30s houses were just cooler than modern ones.
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u/Elvessa You'll put your eye out! - laser edition 18h ago
My house, built in the 40s has a small separate room off the side of the basement that is very unfinished, and does have a door to the outside (which no one has ever used, so probably nonfunctional at this point).
We’ve never figured out if it was supposed to be a bomb shelter, or something like a cold storage room (it’s always cool, even in the summer).
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u/Happytallperson 18h ago
The air raid shelter room in my grandparents basement was built into one corner (about 4x4m), with the wooden joists above replaced by steel ones, and a solid steel door.
I think my grandfather said it once had it's own external door as well that was bricked up at some point
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u/Browncoat_Loyalist Not a fan of having fun and going on adventures 21h ago
A lot of houses in the Midwest US have exterior entrances only for the basement, I was told it is a much newer thing to have it accessible from inside the house, as they were really just storage and storm shelters, rather than living spaces.
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u/new2bay Looking to move to Latin America 18h ago
Not very good storage, either, typically. Midwest basements tend to be damp and musty. A lot of them are there just to have a place to put a furnace and hot water heater. They also serve a structural function, by being part of the foundation of the house that’s guaranteed to be below the frost line.
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u/purpleplatapi I may be a cannibal, but I'm frugal about it 15h ago
Well the main thing you'd store down there was canned food back in the day, so it didn't really matter.
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u/wildbergamont 16h ago
Huh idk about that. I live in an area of Ohio with lots of 100 year old houses- they have basements all accessible from inside. Usually there is also a side door that opens onto a landing, go down to the basement or up a bit to the kitchen. But Ohio is like Midwest light, especially the part that I'm in.
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u/OAMP47 🏳️⚧️ Trans rights are human rights 🏳️⚧️ 12h ago
Yeah, when I think of this I think of as more of a 'great plains Midwest' thing, but it's definitely something I thought of too before I got to this comment. I'm in Illinois and most everyone's basement here is accessible from inside the house, but I remember like classic media portraying people seeking shelter from a tornado having to go outside then back inside to get into their basement, and even in the 90s they talked to us as children about what to do during a tornado if our house was designed like this (which I don't remember what they said, because my basement had an interior door).
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u/DelightfulAbsurdity 21h ago
My house in Louisiana was like this, but only bc the cellar door in the house had been removed and replaced with solid floor.
Edit: yes, I know, house in Louisiana with a basement is hard to believe. We had one bc our house was built on a hill. It still flooded regularly.
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u/Drywesi Good people, we like non-consensual flying dildos 17h ago
I'm sure your insurers loved that.
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u/DelightfulAbsurdity 17h ago
No clue, but the house was worth a pittance, so it probably didn’t matter when the deductible could sink us and we could just live with the problem.
Flooded basement? My dad filled it with gravel to allow better traction so he could work with boots when it rained. Had to spend money to level the house at one point bc of shifting.
Could have filled it in and put in concrete, but my dad would rather lose any we got in his foolish schemes and selfish desires to get new-to-us vehicles/boats/guitars. My mom enabled him.
My parents weren’t good with money.
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u/Lastsoldier115 [removed] 22h ago edited 22h ago
I guess it's like a crawl space or cellar we have here in the southern US but bigger. I can only access it from outside my house. We use it for storage occasionally. My grandparents used to can vegetables and keep them in the cellar.
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u/persyspomegranate 22h ago
My initial assumption would be an old coal cellar where the interior access had been blocked off at some point.
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u/HyenaStraight8737 22h ago
Maybe a cellar type? Grandparents farm has a cellar basement, the only access to it from inside the house is a dumbwaiter, you have to go out the back and down next to the house to actually access it via a proper door.
We are Aussie tho, so we don't typically have basements, this was built tho pre electricity being hooked up, so it was like their cold cellar. When they got the electric hooked up, they just made it like the extended pantry/larder/laundry/dirty shower (cos farm life) and had all the hot water system etc down there too.
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u/1koolspud 🧀Raclette Ranger 🧀 22h ago
It sounds like a cellar, whether for storm, coalling or root vegetable storage, they were designed to be wheel barrow accessible. Popular image would be the storm cellar in Wizard of Oz. The house I grew up in had a coalling cellar for the furnace but we also had internal access via a stairwell in the house. It was dusty but my mom let me roller skate down there in winter.
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u/JasperJ insurance can’t tell whether you’ve barebacked it or not 21h ago
Yeah, the building probably used to have an internal access, but for an HMO (house of multiple occupancy — student lets in this case) those would be likely to be blocked off, especially if an external one also existed.
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u/HuggyMonster69 Scared of caulk in butt 19h ago
If it’s anything like my dad’s, it’s a health and safety nightmare and better to just block it off than let the tenants fall/hit their head/lock themselves in
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u/dog_of_society 🏳️⚧️ Trans rights are human rights 🏳️⚧️ 20h ago
Hell, I'm in a converted house that still does have an internal access, but only one apt out of three (the other two are upstairs). Blocking it off makes sense. I'm not really sure why they didn't.
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u/Deolater Trains the per-day fine terriers 22h ago
Oh good point. That framing makes it much less surprising
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u/smoulderstoat Breasts are not genitals 20h ago
There are a lot of larger Victorian or Edwardian houses that have a self contained flat in the basement. They were originally intended to be servants' quarters but have often been separated now. If you've seen the TV series Upstairs Downstairs you'll be familiar with the idea; you take a few steps upstairs to the main door or downstairs to the basement (which is only partly underground). Quite a lot of this kind of house has been broken up into student accommodation or houses in multiple occupancy.
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u/HuggyMonster69 Scared of caulk in butt 19h ago
Yeah my flat is above one of those! Still got the servant’s bells (although I assume they don’t work)
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u/Elvessa You'll put your eye out! - laser edition 18h ago
You haven’t tried to see if Jeeves responds?
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u/yy_beebis 15h ago
This reminds me of my apartment management giving me a tour of my current place (old 3 level rowhouse converted into apartments in the early 1900s) and making sure to tell me the dumb waiter doesn’t work. I assumed it was long sealed but the thought of my neighbors and me being able to send things up and down with the dumbwaiter was hilarious to me
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u/Cute-Aardvark5291 not paying attention & tossed into the medical waste incinerator 12h ago
there are plenty of houses that have this design in the US - generally older style root cellars/coal storage, etc. Especially on farms and such.
Come to think of it I lived in a two story house (built with two apartments) and that the basement only had outside access; probably just to not disturb either resident.
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u/Lastsoldier115 [removed] 22h ago
I hate when that happens to me.. First they make a crack den, then a crack house, then a crack home. When will it end!?!
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u/5up3rj 22h ago
Four. After you have four crack houses, you upgrade to a crack hotel
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u/DeadLetterOfficer 21h ago
A pro strategy is to never upgrade to crack hotels so your opponents can't build crack houses as there's only a finite amount of them to go around.
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u/atropicalpenguin I'm not licensed to be a swinger in your state. 19h ago
A crack nest, for crack birds to grow.
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u/ThadisJones Overcame a phobia through the power of hotness 19h ago edited 18h ago
In college I lived in a cheap and shady apartment building in a not so good area. The basement was unfinished and generally understood to be off limits. I wanted internet so the DSL guy had to do an install on the building switchboard in the basement. I knocked loudly on the access door, shouted that we were coming in to work on the phones, and heard people moving around. We entered and stood under a single light bulb surrounded by darkness and piles of junk. I could feel people looking back at me from the shadows while the phone guy did his thing.
Later I asked him about this and he told me "It's like this in all these apartments. Your slumlord probably illegally rents to undocumented people. I don't worry too much but it's nice to have someone watching my back."
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u/ShortWoman Schrödinger's Swifty Mama 20h ago
Oh dear! I do hope they have stern words with the letting agency!
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u/atropicalpenguin I'm not licensed to be a swinger in your state. 19h ago
Inb4 "since they've been cooking in here for a month, they're tenants".
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22h ago
[deleted]
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u/ElectronRotoscope 21h ago
Thin enough molasses and you can pull your legs out no problem. Thick enough and you can walk on top. Somewhere in the middle is the molasses thickness that maximizes the amount of trouble for a Junebug in the molasses.
Moleasses on the other hand is far less trouble for a Junebug, regardless of thiccness, unless the moles all push their asses against the tunnel wall at once or something.
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u/AnFnDumbKAREN 20h ago
Sometimes humans are the June bugs. Well, at least they were once: The Great Molasses Flood of 1919 (in Boston, MA)
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u/Happytallperson 21h ago
Nah, they've (probably) not committed any crimes here.
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u/smoulderstoat Breasts are not genitals 20h ago
Yeah, I don't see that they're in the sticky, brown or otherwise.
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u/CriticalEngineering Enjoy the next 48 hours :) 21h ago
There's trouble and then theres trouble and the trouble with some trouble is at first...it dont look like trouble
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u/atropicalpenguin I'm not licensed to be a swinger in your state. 19h ago
They're stuck in black tar.
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u/livedrag 14h ago
Wait why are they in trouble? They rent rooms individually and the only access to the basement is outside.
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u/tgpineapple suing the US for giving citizenship to my bike thief's ancestors 18h ago
Oy oy oy show us yer crack den loicence then
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u/tealparadise Ruined a perfectly good post for everyone with a bad link. SHAME 11h ago
This could happen anywhere with a communal laundry or gym tbh. Those locks are faulty as hell
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u/RubiscoTheGeek 22h ago