Week in Review : MAJOR EVENTS, IMAGES AND PEOPLE IN ORANGE COUNTY NEWS : MISCELLANY / NEWSMAKERS AND MILESTONES
Two packages making their way through the regional postal processing center in Santa Ana were soggy and leaking, so postal workers set them aside for rewrapping.
What postal clerk James T. Aylward discovered inside was tropical fruit shipped from Hawaii. He turned the packages over to county agricultural inspectors, who found in the fruit live larvae of the Mediterranean and Oriental fruit flies, the kind that send a shudder through the agriculture industry.
Between 1980 and 1982, California spent $100 million to eradicate a Mediterranean fruit-fly infestation.
“This is an enormously significant find,” said Gera Curry, spokeswoman for the state Department of Food and Agriculture in Sacramento. “It demonstrates what we have suspected all along: that these fruit-fly infestations are definitely connected to fruit being shipped illegally from Hawaii through the mails.”
The enormously destructive intruders would not have been discovered “had there not been this fortuitous accident--that these packages needed rewrapping--and alert postal workers,” Curry said.
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