News Release

2008

Nov 19

Rivco Code Officer Saves County Taxpayers Nearly $1 Million

Thousands of tons of rubbish left on the unincorporated doorstep of the City of Blythe, and who was going to clean it up?

The mess, left by a company known as Mission Fiber, covered a half dozen acres, 14 feet high on South Broadway. It was unsightly, it was smelly, it was breeding vermin, and that wasn’t the worst part. What if it caught fire? The prospect of a toxic plume and the runoff of toxic fluids in such an event was not a pleasant prospect, to say the least. County fire personnel said there were inadequate (or non-existent) fire flows to the site, and that fighting such a toxic blaze would be almost impossible.

Several county departments were working on the problem, hoping to force compliance by Mission Fiber so that County taxpayers wouldn’t have to pick up the tab and so that Blythe residents wouldn’t have to be evacuated in the middle of the night in the event fire did break out.

Riverside County Code Enforcement Officer George Gianos, already known in the Palo Verde Valley as a guy who gets things done, persisted in his attempts to clean up the site. After months of coaxing and coercing the company into compliance, site visits and meticulous documentation of progress, or lack thereof, a break: he located a state program that had promise to end his nightmare.

Gianos wrote to the California Integrated Waste Management Board requesting assistance. In his letter, Gianos painted a grim picture of the worst case of dumping that he has seen in his career:

“…The commercial industrial businesses bordering Mission Fiber have repeatedly complained about waste contamination. One example is a hay company. The trash from Mission Fiber is getting caught in the bundles of hay that are staged for export. The hay has to be cleared of rubbish to pass inspection. Also, business owners are concerned about the increase in the rat rodent population . . . There is a strong concern if a fire occurred. The site has no water suppression . . . extreme wind conditions would move fire debris across the Interstate 10 freeway and into the City residential areas. This would cause a disruption of the freeway traffic and a partial evacuation of residential areas. A weak limited attempt by Mission Fiber to comply was initiated. Bundles of rubbish were transferred from Blythe and dumped illegally in Kern County, California and La Paz County, Arizona…”

Gianos travelled to Sacramento to plead his case; state officials visited the site and agreed with his assessment.

End result: a State of California cleanup of the mess. What once was a mountain of trash is now a clean and clear piece of real estate.

“I was doing my job,” Gianos said. “It irked me that somebody could get away with something like that, so I wanted to fix it.”

Fix it he did. The state estimated the cleanup cost at $950,000, not a bad savings to the taxpayers of Riverside County, and not a bad holiday present for the residents of Blythe.