Officials Declare Medflies Gone; Quarantine Ends

Agriculture officials declared victory Monday against a Mediterranean fruit fly infestation in the San Fernando Valley, lifting a 62-square-mile produce quarantine that had been in effect for more than 3 months.

“Any time we can declare the eradication of a Medfly or any exotic pest, it’s cause for celebration,” said Los Angeles County Agricultural Commissioner E. Leon Spaugy.

Six Medflies were found in the Valley in late July, but none have been found since.

That number is “relatively small” compared to an infestation of 48 Medflies in West Los Angeles, said Gera Curry, spokeswoman for the state Department of Food and Agriculture. The Valley eradication effort cost about $1 million in state and federal funds, she said.

Five days after the first Medflies were found on July 20 in Northridge, a 16-square-mile area was sprayed from the air with malathion, a chemical pesticide. Officials also applied the chemical from the ground in areas where the flies were found. Next, about 317 million sterile Medflies were released in Northridge and Reseda from Aug. 2 to Oct. 4 to mate the pests out of existence.

It worked, Spaugy said. The announcement of eradication Monday followed the passing of three life spans of sterile flies without the discovery of more wild flies.

Quarantine Lifted

The eradication of the pest and lifting of the quarantine mean home-grown produce can be moved freely. Under the quarantine, locally grown fruit or vegetables could not be removed from an area bounded roughly by De Soto Avenue on the west, Woodman Avenue on the east, the Simi Valley Freeway on the north and Burbank and Victory boulevards on the south.

The quarantine, announced July 28, affected about five small produce growers and about 30 nurseries, officials said. The growers had to submit to spraying of their plants, and nurseries had to strip fruit from trees.

“It might have affected sales a little bit,” said Mike Connell, manager of Green Thumb/Green Arrow, a Canoga Park company with two nurseries in the quarantined area. Fruit trees are far less enticing without the fruit, he said.

Some growers lost the season’s first tomato crop, which rotted because it could not be picked before chemical treatment was applied over a period of several weeks. John Bollinger, who runs a Northridge produce stand with his wife, said the infestation cost his business several thousand dollars.

Infestations are believed to be started when infested fruit is mailed from Hawaii, where Medflies are common, or is brought into the state by travelers, Spaugy said. Officials hope infestations will be reduced by a new law making it a misdemeanor to send produce through first-class mail. The law also gives officials the authority to inspect suspect first-class packages.