If it seems like Gwinnett police bust a new marijuana "grow house" every day, you're not far from the mark.

Police have raided about a dozen Gwinnett homes just this month. The houses have been in quiet subdivisions on suburban streets. They look just like every other house on the block. The activities around the houses didn't seem to draw much attention. Which, of course, was the point.

Gwinnett police and sheriff's deputies have raided 14 houses around the county since the first one Feb. 26, Gwinnett's district attorney Danny Porter said. One bust has often lead to other operations. Fourteen people have been arrested, he said. And police probably haven't found the last house yet, he said.

In several cases, police have entered a house to find the pot in the basement, but the home abandoned. But Gwinnett police continue to make arrests. Two more people were arrested Wednesday, Porter said.

"All the indications are that the operation is continuing, in the hopes that we won't find the houses," Porter said.

Police in other counties have found the grow houses in rural areas. But in Gwinnett, the houses have been placed in unassuming neighborhoods, Porter said. "

"The way they're set up, they're designed to blend into the neighborhoods," he said. The neighbors had no idea, Porter added. Most of the houses were priced around $250,000. The growers tapped into the electrical grid in front of electricity meters, stealing power and avoiding attention. The growers use strong lights and hydroponics to grow unusually strong marijuana, police said. At a house busted earlier this week, the pot plants were 8 feet tall, he said.

"I have to say, from a construction and engineering standpoint , they are the most amazing things I've seen in my career," Porter said. "The wiring is professionally done. The hydroponics are state of the art. ... Going into the house, the smell will knock you down. But from the outside, you can't smell anything."

Not all the busts have resulted in arrests. It seems that many of the growers have disappeared, but some growers have stayed to tend the plants. A few may have been so low on the organization's totem pole that they didn't have transportation to escape investigators, Porter said.

"They just dropped them off and told them to watch the plants," Porter said.

In other cases, they may have stayed because they were close to harvesting their crops.

Gwinnett Police said more than $10 million in marijuana has been impounded so far. Gwinnett County has used a standard of $1,000 per pound to state the street value of the crops seized, Porter said.

But Fayette County police said the potent cannabis is worth three to six times as much, depending on whether it's sold locally or shipped to New York City.

The investigation started with a tip from drug investigators in Miami which led to the Feb. 13 arrests of Merquiades Martinez, 35, and Blanca Botello, 34, in Fayetteville. Since then, police in more than a dozen counties have been hunting pot-growing operations all over metro Atlanta.

Martinez ran Panoramic Garden Hydroponics just north of Fayetteville in a rundown strip shopping center on Ga. 8. Botello was a licensed ReMax Realtor who sold at least six of the houses that have been seized by police.

One by one, raids have led to more raids. Sheriff's deputies in Walton County arrested Juan Martin Lopez on Thursday. Police think he's one of the masterminds of a wide-ranging pot-growing operation.

"We definitely know that he's linked to several houses," said Capt. Chris Cannon, chief of detectives in the Walton County Sheriff's Office.

Like Gwinnett, Walton County has raided about a dozen grow houses since the investigation began. The sheer scope of the investigation has begun to tax the relatively small police force's resources.

"This is what we've been doing," Cannon said. "We haven't been involved in a general-investigation case since Monday." he said.

Although the pace of arrests has slowed, there has been a steady stream of raids on grow houses. The Gwinnett police department has taken to issuing press releases at the end of the day showing its raids in a batch count. The marijuana seizures have become a daily routine.