Tiny Town Gets Wired, Feels the Power

Light has always had a sound here--the round-the-clock moan of a diesel generator.

Since the Depression, when this sandy speck of a place was founded 28 miles east of Indio, it has depended on diesel-powered generators to turn on the lights, chill the sodas and pump the gas.

But the collection of mobile homes, a small military museum and a restaurant and service station on an isolated stretch of Interstate 10 is about to lose its rumble. Chiriaco Summit, population 75, is finally plugging into the main electrical power grid.

It took more than $1 million and politicking by the local matriarch to get eight miles of power lines strung across a bombing range and tortoise habitat.

“In 1955 my grandparents in rural Iowa received electrification, and we’re just getting it now,” Jan Holmlund said with a chuckle.

She is director of the Gen. George S. Patton Memorial Museum, the first building in Chiriaco to get hooked up. The light falling on the World War II military collection honoring troops who trained on the local sands doesn’t look any different--but it is far more reliable. The generator frequently failed, Holmlund said. Last year it went out with such a bang that it blew the museum’s two computers, its refrigerator and its heating and air-conditioning unit.

Certainly Robert and Margit Chiriaco Rusche, children of the man who started the original summit businesses in 1933, won’t miss the generator.

“It’s a huge worry, 24 hours a day, seven days a week,” Margit said recently in the family cafe, home of the Chiriaco Burger. “Every time you go away and come back you make sure the Chevron sign is on” to see if the generator is working.

The long-sought hookup to the electrical grid was pushed along by environmental regulations. The state frowned on the generator’s diesel emissions. And a law effective in 1998 mandated replacement of the old underground tanks in which the diesel fuel was stored.

The rules briefly threatened to shut down the entire settlement, because the family was barred from using the old tanks but did not have new ones in place. The problem was solved when the Chiriacos leased, and later bought, an aboveground tank.

The hookup to Imperial Irrigation District power lines will cost Chiriaco residents--mostly workers in the few businesses and their families--about $336,000. They will be charged a slightly higher rate than the district’s norm to cover the expense.

The installation cost was actually much greater because the new lines, run from a substation at Niland, crossed habitat for the threatened desert tortoise and special measures were taken to protect the animals.

The grid hookup will allow Chiriaco to expand. There are already plans to construct a microwave tower, a mini-mart and an air museum on the small adjacent air strip built during World War II.

Back then, the surrounding desert was thick with soldiers training for tank warfare at Camp Young, one of a network of training centers operated between 1942 and 1944 on a sprawling band of sand and scrub spread across parts of California, Nevada and Arizona.

The museum, opened in 1988, was named after Camp Young’s first commander, Gen. Patton, who, like his soldiers, patronized the only businesses around: the Chiriacos’.

Along with two sisters who now live elsewhere, Robert, now 60, and Margit, 62, grew up helping their parents run the place. They washed dishes, pumped gas, flipped burgers and hunted for leaks in the water line.

Their parents, Joe and Ruth, never left, gradually expanding the family property to 700 acres, most of it still empty. They died within months of each other in 1996.

Margit has wandered as far as Alaska, but has always returned. Her daughter Heather and son-in-law now help run the highway stop.

The family’s next project: convincing the phone company to expand service to the summit. The community now has only two lines, which are often so busy the cafe has trouble checking customers’ credit cards.

“Since we got past that [fuel] tank disaster in 1998,” Margit said, “we can do anything.”