Rivco Code Officer Saves County Taxpayers Nearly $1 Million
category:Government and Politics posted:November 20th, 2008
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:
