Nine months ago, the Kennebec County Sheriff’s Office raided the home of an Albion woman and uncovered one of the most sophisticated marijuana-growing operations it had ever seen.

It involved 730 plants that they said were worth about $250,000.

But the woman, Elaine P. Rogers, was nowhere to be found.

Authorities confirmed today that Rogers, 54, has been arrested in Florida after local police there searched her new house and seized 217 marijuana plants. She is charged as a felony fugitive from justice and will be extradited back to Maine, police said.

Rogers was arrested without incident June 16 in Sebastian, Fla., which is in the southeastern part of the state, near the coast.

“She was at home; she was read her Miranda rights and waived them,” said Thom Raulen, spokesman for The Indian River County Sheriff’s Office, of Vero Beach, Fla. “She spoke with detectives on scene and indicated she was growing for personal use in order to sell and make a living.”

The search resulted from anonymous tips investigated by Detective Robert Vafiades, of the Sebastian Police Department, that a single-family house at 1786 Laconia St. was a “potential marijuana grow house,” Raulen said. Vafiades then spearheaded the search with the Multi-Agency Criminal Enforcement Unit.

The warrant was executed at 9:35 a.m. and officers said they found 217 marijuana plants, which weighed in at a total of 64.24 pounds. The seized marijuana has an estimated street value of at least $50,000, Raulen said, though the value is difficult to gauge because several of the larger plants would have continued to grow and yield more marijuana.

“Some were as big as trees,” Raulen said.

Rogers was alone inside the house and was apparently the only person living there, Raulen said.

In addition to the charge of being a fugitive wanted in Maine, Rogers was charged with cultivating marijuana and trafficking more than 25 pounds of marijuana.

Rogers, who is being held without bail, is scheduled to appear in a Florida court Aug. 6.

The raid on her home at 42 Clark Road in Albion happened Sept. 9, 2009, and Kennebec County Sheriff Randall Liberty said at the time that his officers had uncovered “the most sophisticated growing operation that I have seen in 27 years.”

Inside, officers discovered a marijuana-growing operation that accounted for “more than 80 percent of the living space,” Liberty said, with plants up to 6 feet tall stored in eight growing rooms. The rooms were equipped with growing lights, timers, fertilizer and ventilation systems and the property also contained two additional buildings that were full of growing marijuana plants. A large commercial generator – used mainly at construction sites – was running continuously inside a shed so the drug operation’s electricity use was “off the grid and off our radar,” Liberty said.

Kennebec County Chief Deputy Everett Flannery said today that his department was pleased Rogers had been apprehended, though he believed it would be “quite some time” before Rogers could be extradited back to Maine, because of the drug charges pending in Florida.

Rogers’ Albion home, he said, had been turned into “an extremely large operation.”

“The whole building was pretty much an entire operation of growing marijuana,” Flannery said.

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