Last Sunday, the mightiest storm on record to hit the Bahamas started blowing off roofs, flipping cars, and causing extreme flooding. Hurricane Dorian is, in fact, the second-strongest Atlantic hurricane since records began, with destructive winds of up to 165mph (270km/h).
And now according to CNN, the category 2 hurricane washed up 16 bricks of cocaine on two beaches in Florida.
The first beach was Paradise Beach Park in Melbourne, Florida and the brick of cocaine, thought to have weighed a kilogram, washed ashore on Tuesday, just as the hurricane started hitting the state's east coast, local officials said, according to the publication.
This captain of a shrimp boat unexpectedly caught a package of cocaine in his net:Lt. Trevor Shaffer from the Melbourne Police Department told Fox News that an officer was on foot patrol at Paradise Beach Park at about eight in the morning. The day before, an individual told the officer something "suspicious" seemed to have washed up. The officer looked into it and came across a package of what appeared to be recreational drugs as it was "wrapped in a way that was consistent with narcotics."
When the officer had the contents of the package tested, it was confirmed to be cocaine.
This wasn't the only package of cocaine to have washed ashore, supposedly by the waves of the recent hurricane. On Cocoa Beach, 20 miles north of Melbourne, a duffel bag containing 15 more bricks of cocaine, wrapped in the same manner, was discovered by police.
Sergeant Manny Hernandez of Cocoa Beach Police Department told Fox Business that each brick weighed a kilo. He also said that the estimated street value of a kilo of cocaine in Florida is between $20,000 and $30,000.
"We don't know if the incident and drug recovery in Melbourne was related to what we found in Cocoa Beach," he said. "Between the two seizures, the net haul of the drugs washing onto Florida shores amid Hurricane Dorian is worth at least $810,000."