Collapse of Graves Draws Complaints : Flooding: About 800 plots have sunk at nation’s second-busiest national cemetery in Riverside after last week’s heavy rainstorms. Official blames drought, soil.

As the first of Southern California’s war dead from the Persian Gulf were being laid to rest, maintenance crews at the nation’s second-busiest national cemetery worked frantically on Wednesday to shore up nearly 800 graves that collapsed and sank, some up to 18 inches, under last week’s onslaught of rain.

Steve Muro, assistant director of the Riverside National Cemetery--where two local Persian Gulf veterans were buried this week--said it could take up to two weeks to repair the damaged graves, most of which are in the cemetery’s northeast corner.

Flooded by four inches of rain in three days, the 58,000-plot cemetery has been reduced in spots to a succession of muddy holes. Here and there, oblong headstones list into the earth. A few graves are collapsed by more than a foot.

In section 20B, where U.S. Marine Pfc. Adam Hoage of Corona and U.S. Army Pfc. Adrienne Mitchell were buried on Tuesday and Wednesday, respectively, the damage is less extensive, with only about a dozen collapsed graves. Muro said that, so far, neither family has complained about conditions at the cemetery.

But others have.

“It’s pitiful,” said World War II veteran Nick Ciolli, 77, of Santee in San Diego County, who set out on Saturday with a pot of blue and white flowers for his wife Margaret’s grave only to find it “sunk in mud a foot and a half deep.”

“Normally,” he said, “I stay for two hours, but this time I just couldn’t. All I could do was cry.”

Riverside National Cemetery is one of 113 burial spots in the nation’s national cemetery system and the only one in Southern California with land left for casket burials. Administered by the Department of Veterans Affairs, the cemetery was built in 1976.

Only the Calverton National Cemetery in New York is busier these days than Riverside, where up to 30 service members and relatives are buried each day, Muro said. But for the last several months, the cemetery has been the focus of federal scrutiny and local complaints, in part because of the sinkage that occurs with each heavy rain.

The desert climate in Riverside, along with the drought and ensuing water cutbacks at the cemetery, have for several years kept the soil from settling properly, Muro said.

“One of the things we’re faced with is the type of soil we have,” he said. “It’s a clay soil and, when there is no rain, it can take years to settle.”

Officials at other graveyards in Riverside County said sinkage has not been a problem at their sites either because of differences in the soil or because they have taken steps to counteract the problem.

At Riverside National, Muro said, better irrigation and maintenance might help, but the cemetery relies on dwindling congressional appropriations and cannot afford the expense.

Grass also might mitigate the problem, but unlike private cemeteries, Riverside National does not plant grass until several dozen graves in a particular area have been filled. Muro explained that the procedure is the only way crews can keep up with the high rate of burials and still stay within their budget, which was $1.8 million this fiscal year.

Consequently, newer areas of the cemetery are bare dirt, vulnerable to flooding. In 1980, 500 graves were damaged by heavy rains. Some graves that had been recently dug sank as much as two feet and others were completely submerged in muddy water.

Last month, after Bill Keene, a World War II veteran from Huntington Beach, complained to several veterans organizations about the lack of grass and the muddy condition of his wife’s grave, national lobbyists for the Veterans of Foreign Wars, the American Legion and other groups launched a campaign to clean up the Riverside cemetery.

“I cannot imagine your grandchildren or mine--or anyone, for that matter--visiting this national disgrace in hopes of decorating their grandfather’s grave, only to find it had disappeared in a mudhole,” wrote Vaughn Brown, national commander of AMVETS in a Jan. 22 letter to Edward J. Derwinski, the secretary of veterans affairs.

Muro said the campaign prompted the VA to reallocate extra money for Riverside to cover the cost of needed new equipment and overtime for work crews.

However, he said, even that extra money is no guarantee that the flooding problem will be cured.

“Our employees are doing the best they can,” Muro said, “but people are going to have to realize where the money comes from.”