Tiny Hamlet Braces for a Power Play

This is the night that, by law, the power should be turned off in this desert hamlet, leaving its 60 residents--including a 2-week-old baby--in the dark and cold and without running water.

And this is the night that Margit Chiriaco, the local matriarch and a normally law-abiding citizen, is prepared to break the law and declare power to the people.

Chiriaco and her brother, whose parents founded this freeway offramp outpost, are supposed to stop using diesel fuel to run their power generator--the tiny community’s only source of electricity--because it is stored in old underground tanks that are banned as of midnight. Such tanks have been declared environmentally hazardous under state and federal laws approved more than a decade ago that take effect tonight.

Let the feds and state and county come after her, she dares; the necessity to keep the power running is where she draws a line in the sand.

And there’s plenty of it out here, alongside Interstate 10 in the godforsaken wastelands between Indio and Blythe, a land so miserably desolate and unforgiving that Gen. George Patton trained his revered desert troops here during World War II.

The unincorporated hamlet--its gas station ($1.39 for a gallon of unleaded), coffee shop (Spam and eggs, $5.75) and trailer park (where 76-year-old Virginia Vanderhoef coddles her neighbors’ kittens)--is so isolated, there’s not a single electric power line in sight.

And therein rests the problem.

Chiriaco (pronounced sher-A-ko) Summit has never been served by outside electricity, and long-awaited power lines, now eight miles away, won’t be extended here for another few months.

For as long as this place has existed --since Aug. 15, 1933--it has depended on diesel-powered generators to provide electricity.

They have worked just dandy to this day, even if their limitations have in the past scared off a prospective fast-food restaurant and RV park. But at midnight tonight, the Chiriaco family will no longer be able to legally pump fuel from their underground gas station storage tanks to their Caterpillar 3406 diesel generator. The machine faithfully pumps the community’s lifeblood, 375 kilowatts of power, 24 hours a day.

Deadline Catches Many Unprepared

The underground tank deadline was established by federal and state laws passed in 1988 ordering that single-walled underground storage tanks--which are prone to leaks because of their age and construction--no longer be used after tonight.

The Chiriaco family--like tens of thousands of other storage tank owners around the state and nation--didn’t meet the deadline.

Nationwide, only about 56% of about 892,000 underground storage tanks have been properly upgraded, the federal Environmental Protection Agency estimates.

The Chiriacos say it took this long to come up with the money--about $150,000--to pay for the work. There have been other government-mandated costs to doing business out here as well--including $80,000 for a new firefighting waterline and a half-million dollars for a water treatment plant.

When the Chiriacos finally got their finances lined up, they--like others who waited until the last minute--had to wait their turn for overbooked storage tank installers.

The double-walled tanks were finally delivered last week. But they won’t be government-certified for several more weeks, and the electrical power lines won’t arrive until about March. Even with power, the diesel is still needed to sell to truckers.

The old tanks remain in the ground, filled with gasoline and the life-sustaining diesel. But come midnight, continued use of the old tanks will, by law, generate $500-a-day fines.

Margit and Bob Chiriaco say they will shut down their gas station temporarily because it was their fault for waiting too long to install the new tanks. Fine.

“But for us to go without electricity--and not cook food and flush toilets and run heaters? I’m going to keep that generator going at any cost,” she declared. “And if they [county enforcement officers] get us on that, then this is a heartless society. I’m going to stick my neck out.”

Other users of fuel from aging storage tanks are in similar straits--including some government agencies.

Last week, the Los Angeles City Council ordered that fuel trucks be brought in to deliver gas to police, sanitation and other city facilities--at a cost of at least $50,000--because even the city hadn’t abided by the federal and state deadline to install the tanks.

Maybe bureaucrats deserve the wrath of fellow bureaucrats, the Chiriacos say. But out here in the desert, they plead, have a heart. State EPA officials say the law is clear in allowing no exceptions. Enforcement of the law is delegated to the local counties “and they shouldn’t be looking to the state to bail people out with extensions,” said Jim Spagnole, a spokesman for the state EPA.

Mike Shetler, a supervisor for the Riverside County environmental health department, knows about the problem at Chiriaco Summit, but said his marching orders are to enforce the law, period.

“We’re supposed to proceed with enforcement starting [Wednesday] and when we get to them [at Chiriaco Summit], we get to them,” he said.

In reality, an enforcement officer may not make the trek out here for a couple weeks. But even then, the new tanks won’t be ready and the Chiriacos would get written up.

Emergency Declaration

Riverside County Supervisor Roy Wilson, whose district includes this area, said he will ask his colleagues today to approve an emergency declaration “that Chiriaco Summit’s population is at risk, because their power, their water, their heat, is dependent on diesel fuel to run their generators.”

He will ask the Board of Supervisors to give Chiriaco Summit an extra six weeks to comply with the law before enforcement action is taken--by which time the new tanks should be certified.

“They’re not the only ones who waited until the end and found that all the contractors were busy,” Wilson said Monday. “But theirs isn’t just a business that we can shut down. There are extenuating circumstances. The residents there need their power.”

Margit Chiriaco appreciates the sympathy. The family has been accustomed to surviving without outside help, ever since her father, Joseph L. Chiriaco--a onetime surveyor for the old Los Angeles water department--came out here to map plans for the California Aqueduct, became smitten with the desert and opened up a gas station and general store to serve canal construction crews.

With World War II, the market served up pig’s feet, Acme beer and other rations sought by GIs in training. And the summit continued to prosper when the big interstate replaced old Highway 60 in 1969. (Nevermind the night a big rig veered off the freeway and rammed into the bedroom of the old motel. Close call, no injuries.)

The Chiriacos still have big plans, when electricity comes this spring: a new gas station with a fast-food joint inside, and an RV park for snowbirds from Canada. But until the power line is draped into town, that old Caterpillar diesel generator will need to be fed.

“I’ll take an extension if they give it to me,” Margit Chiriaco said Monday. “We’re not the kind of people to break the law. I’m just hoping they’ll let us fudge a little.”