Fruit or Not, Mail Must Go Out Promptly, Officials Say

U.S. Postal Service officials have ordered workers in Orange County to stop inspecting packages suspected of containing rotting, quarantined fruit, despite warnings from state agricultural experts that such parcels are a major source of the fruit flies that have infested parts of California off and on since 1981.

Sealed packages in first-class mail, even if they are soggy or leaking and have broken open, are protected by privacy laws and must be rewrapped and promptly sent on to the addressee, employees have been told by regional Postal Service inspectors.

State agricultural officials, meanwhile, fearful of a repeat of the 1981 Mediterranean fruit fly infestation that cost more than $100 million to eradicate, have been working with a California congressman to change that. Legislation is being sought to put packages suspected of holding fruit into the same category as those thought to contain illegal narcotics.

‘Misdirected Effort’

An internal Postal Service investigation concluded at the end of 1987 that Santa Ana postal workers were illegally holding back packages suspected of containing quarantined fruit from Hawaii. Current law bans the shipment of fresh produce from Hawaii, Puerto Rico and U.S. territories by first-class mail but provides no way for suspicious packages to be inspected.

“The investigation disclosed that employees are, in a misdirected but conscientious effort, detaining, delaying and removing parcels from the mail stream,” Eric G. Larson, chief inspector for the Postal Service’s regional office in San Bruno, wrote in a Dec. 17 memo to Orange County Postmaster Hector G. Godinez.

Larson’s letter said postal workers were isolating parcels that had wet sides or bottoms and the odor of fruit and then sending a special delivery letter to the addressee requesting permission to open the package. If there was no response within 10 days, the parcel would be beturned to the sender.

But if the package began to break down during that period, it would be sent to the post office’s “rewrap” section where, if it was determined that the contents were subject to quarantine, county agricultural inspectors would be called in and the contents destroyed.

Fruit Not ‘Immediate Danger’

Federal regulations allow domestic mail to be detained, opened and removed from Postal Service custody only when the contents represent “an immediate danger to life or limb, or immediate and substantial danger to property,” Larson said in the memo.

“Plants and plant products do not come under the provisions of these instructions,” he added.

Larson’s findings were transmitted down the chain of command in a Jan. 4 memo from Godinez to employees at the General Mail Facility in Santa Ana.

“Please be advised that no package is to be detained or removed from the mail stream unless it is clearly marked by the sender as containing quarantined plant material, or unless a postal employee has knowledge by some other sources that the package contains such material,” Godinez wrote.

He added: “Even if the package is leaking, it cannot be detained unless it is clearly marked as containing fruit. The wet package must be rewrapped and delivered to the addressee in the best condition possible.”

Neither Larson nor Godinez could be reached for comment Tuesday. Paul Griffo, a spokesman for the Santa Ana post office, confirmed that the office was chastised for its practice of holding back mail.

“He (Larson) cited us chapter and verse of what the regulations were in the domestic mail manual,” Griffo said. “Until we receive further legislation, we just have to go by the book on this one.”

Gera Curry, a spokeswoman for the state Department of Food and Agriculture, said the Postal Service policy runs counter to the state’s efforts to control fruit flies, which she said pose a constant threat to California’s $14-billion-a-year agriculture industry.

Curry said the Santa Ana inspection practices were eliminated after they were publicized by agriculture officials who were grateful for the postal workers’ assistance. The state considers Orange County a trouble spot because recent immigrants from Southeast Asia now living in the county often ask friends or family in Hawaii to ship them fruits native to their homeland, she said.

“We had gone down there and trained them (postal workers) and explained the importance of this quarantine,” Curry said. “They became convinced, as we hoped they would, that one person single-handedly could be in a position of allowing an infestation to occur or stopping it.”

In a yearlong period between the summer of 1986 and the summer of 1987, Curry said, 14 packages from Hawaii were held up at the Santa Ana postal facility. In those packages, inspectors found 250 live Oriental fruit fly larvae and 15 live Mediterranean fruit fly larvae.

It took only six Mediterranean fruit flies to cause an infestation in Los Angeles this year, Curry said. In 1987, there were three Oriental fruit fly eradication projects in Orange County, four in Los Angeles and one in San Diego.

“We felt those workers were being civic minded,” Curry said. “We were saving tax money that would have been spent on eradications, saving pesticides from being used, saving helicopters from being overhead--none of which appeals to any of us.

“We recognized them for it. We wrote to them. We even gave them an award. Then it came down from their legal people at the post office to knock it off.”

Curry said the department is supporting legislation introduced last week by Rep. Tony Coelho (D-Merced) that would impose a maximum penalty of a $1,000 fine and a year in jail for illegally mailing quarantined fruit.

The bill also would allow the Postal Service to detain suspicious packages while inspectors go to a federal magistrate for a search warrant to open them. A similar procedure is used for parcels thought to contain drugs, explosives or firearms.

Coelho’s bill was introduced as a compromise because two other crackdown measures considered last year died in committee amid objections to provisions that would have allowed the Agriculture Department to conduct warrantless searches of first-class mail.

The American Civil Liberties Union and U.S. Postal Service officials said they feared the measures would lead to the erosion of Americans’ expectations of strictly guarded privacy in the transmission of first-class mail.