For more than a month there has been a huge black bear living underneath a man’s home. The man lives in California and the bear has been living in the crawl space beneath an Altadena home.
The homeowner is Ken Johnson and he first discovered this black bear during Thanksgiving week. He had been seeing signs like surveillance cameras capturing the bear squeezing into the small crawlspace under the home.
The black bear is estimated to weigh more than five hundred pounds. He has been causing lots of problems since moving in like twisting the gas lines, damaging heating ducts, and tearing away screens from entering and leaving.
Johnson knew he needed to get this problem fixed so he sought help from the California Department of Fish and Wildlife. He reached out asking them to remove the bear from his property. The department attempted to do this by using air horns, paintball guns, and bear traps. All of these attempts failed to remove the bear from the homeowners land. The bear no matter what would keep on entering the crawlspace. The bear even got defense of his new home and scared off another bear who tried to enter.
The man reached out to California Department of Fish and Wildlife frustrated again but they told him that was all they could do.
Johnson was so frustrated that nothing was working and reached out to the BEAR league this time. A group of volunteers all the way from Lake Tahoe came out to help the the home owner. They got the bear out by sending a volunteer down the crawlspace behind the bear and pushed him to leave. It took 20 minutes for the bear to leave which was much faster than previous attempts from the department. To stop the bear from entering again the volunteers installed an electric mat at the crawl space entrance.
