Waste Water Rises Anew in Trailer Park

Just one day after the owners of a mobile home park pleaded not guilty of a criminal violation of the state health code, waste water was again seeping to the surface of the park just outside the city limits.

Riverside County health inspectors watched Thursday afternoon as a serviceman shoveled away the damp, heavy soil over an apparently overburdened septic system and pumped out about 3,000 gallons of waste from La Corona Mobile Home Park.

When a rusted metal sheet and a pair of broad boards were uncovered, liquid--apparently from the septic tank, a laundry room, or both--bubbled up from the sodden earth. Health officials took photographs and promised to turn their findings over to the district attorney’s office.

Owners Gerald E. Inman and Rita Inman are scheduled to appear in Corona Municipal Court on June 19 for a pretrial hearing in the misdemeanor case filed against them in connection with a similar condition that the county Health Department says it found two months ago.

Some Withholding Rent

“He’s just not taking care of the problem,” Ian Dalgetty, supervising sanitarian for the department, said Thursday.

Neither the Inmans nor their attorney could be reached for comment.

Waste water and sewage “should not be bubbling up,” said Damian Meins, the county’s district sanitarian. “If it’s coming up, that means it’s not going down, and that’s what the system is supposed to do.”

Residents of the park have complained that the septic system regularly backs up into their homes and yards. Records of the county’s Environmental Health Services Division show seven verified complaints of sewage on the ground in 1985, six in 1984, and “similar patterns for the prior years also,” according to Meins.

The continuing sewage problem is a primary reason that more than half the park’s residents began withholding their rent payments at the beginning of May, according to Jill Clark, treasurer of La Corona Mobile Home Owners Assn.

Another reason for the rent strike, Clark said, is a lack of facilities and insufficient maintenance of a recreation room, laundry room, play area and swimming pool in the park.

On Thursday, Art Inman--the owner’s brother--was applying blue-gray paint to the inside and outside walls of the recreation and laundry rooms. And Gerald Inman said last week that he will install swings and a basketball hoop in the play area, now overgrown with weeds and littered with chunks of concrete and pieces of pipe.

Dirty water from the swimming pool was partially drained--into the play area--on Wednesday, and the pool was refilled Thursday, said Michael Thompson, president of the residents’ association.

But the pool, which under a 1983 court order was supposed to open for the summer on Thursday, remained so murky that the two health officials didn’t even bother to test the cloudy, blue water.