Southern California Crime Scene Cleanup

We seldom give much thought to Southern California crime scene cleanup in the 1920s. We should. In those days this type of biohazard cleanup amounted to little more than a janitorial task. With mop in hand and a bucket of clean, sudsy water, janitors went about removing wet, moist, or dry flaky blood from floors. Today we call these three blood cleanup conditions "biohazards" because of bloodborne pathogens. In most other places in the world this same approach works well enough. We're waiting for scientific findings on the passing of bloodborne pathogens to crime scene cleaners. Needle stick for the medical industry provides us with outcomes. They're horrific.

That's the big change in California. Medical staff contracting HIV and hepatitis C from needle stick.

For crime scene cleanup, Southern California has the cutting edge on this coroner controlled business. We have no way of knowing if there's any incidents of bloodborne pathogen contamination for Orange County employees. We know only that some, very few, cheat families of the homicide and suicide victims.

So it goes on this Island on land, county employee fraud right in front of the county district attorneys.

We need to look back to see where we once controlled coroners' departments. In the 1920s we see that the Los Angel4es Times and Los Angeles Examiner were locked in mortal combat. People in those days could see that one or the other would emerge as the top dog in Los Angeles journalism, and, therefore, setting the tone for Southern California.

Southern California began to boom in thee days because of World War I's end and a rising real estate boom in the area. During these years the Los Angeles Times slowly edged out the Los Angeles Examiner. In fact, the Los Angeles Times ran more advertising than any other newspaper in the country. It had become a big hit with early morning Los Angeles residents.

By the end of the 18th century Santa Barbara and Redlands were attracting millionaires from Chicago. Redlands came to be called the "Chicago Colony." Because Southern California's real estate planning included streets and plumbing laid out grid style, immigrants stepped from their Pullman cars into a suburban development devoid of the marauding hoards so common to the frontier settlements in states like Texas, Arizona, Nevada, and Oregon.

If we look for a single individual responsible for Southern California's growth and subsequent crime scene cleanup issues, that person would be George Chaffee. Here's a crime scene of monumental proportions for central and northern Californians, "theft of their water," some would say. At least the California water wars begin with Chaffee's ingenious water works throughout Southern California.

Chaffee moved to Riverside with his family in 1878. Entirely self-educated, he designed an irrigation system similar to a science of irrigation for Southern California. His brother bought some 2,500-acre tract near Riverside in 1881. He created a colony named after an indian chief by the name of Etiwanda of the Great Lakes region. It didn't take long before water flowed to, upon, under, and beyond Etiwanda and Riverside.

Chaffee designed the first dynamo for generating hydroelectric power in the West. He used mountain streams to the same purpose, becoming the first to use cement pipes to transport water long distances. These pipes would last generations. Many succumbed to land development and subdivisions before their natural life ended.

Today Etiwanda has none of the great wealth and signs of progress so common to the days of the Chaffees. It's a near-desert town with sagebrush backyards in many cases. It's bustling streets testify to its inclusion into the Los Angeles megalopolis.

Ecological Progress and the Mutual Water Company

California law recognized a riparian-rights doctrine. He basically severed the water from the land by creating a water company; he then collectivized its ownership by sub-diving his land; each land owner gained one share in the water rights to their community. In this way no one person could monopolize the water, and individuals would have an incentive to care for the water and its sources. The mutual water company created one of the major social inventions of the West. Its loss shall forever be mourned by those fortunate enough to now of it. Crime scene cleanup moves on, not always successful in water use.