Medfly Find in Westminster ‘Very Bad Sign’

Orange County agriculture officials reported Friday that trappers discovered a wild Mediterranean fruit fly in Westminster, a find that could signal that the crop-destroying pest has infested a much larger area than previously thought.

Officials immediately began covering the Westminster region with at least 1,600 more Medfly traps. They said they would hold off, at least for now, on any aerial pesticide spraying over the area until they see whether more flies are found.

“It’s a very bad sign,” county entomologist Nick Nisson said of the Westminster discovery. “This is an area removed from the other (ones detected), and that makes the problem appear much more serious and widespread.”

The fly, an unpregnant female, was found late Thursday afternoon just south of the Garden Grove Freeway on Edwards Street, about 10 miles south of the previous Orange County discovery.

That one, a first for the county, was a pregnant female trapped in Brea on Nov. 17. It triggered the first malathion spraying for Medflies in Orange County history. Helicopters last week sprayed a 10-square-mile section of the county’s northern tip.

Three fertile Medflies were subsequently trapped in La Habra Heights, just across the county line, and agriculture officials ordered a stepped-up eradication program that will take in northern Orange County and that could include as many as 16 more sprayings.

Officials are concerned that there not be a repeat of the infestation of 1981, which devastated the state’s $16-billion agriculture industry.

In ordering the further sprayings this week, state officials acknowledged that they had underestimated the magnitude of the current infestation. The fly in recent months has multiplied at alarming speed in the Southland.

A Medfly was also reported trapped Friday in Boyle Heights, bringing the infestation within a few miles of the produce market in downtown Los Angeles.

As the Medfly problem has become more severe in recent days, so has the criticism from some politicians about the way the state has handled the situation.

Orange County Supervisor Roger R. Stanton charged Friday that the state has “preempted” local government in taking control of Medfly policy-making and crossed “a line of rationality” in ordering more pesticide sprayings.

Citing questions about malathion’s effects on human health and on the environment, Stanton said in an interview, “I just wonder how far we have to go with a potentially risky procedure to protect a very isolated and narrow segment of the economy.”

Los Angeles has been hit harder by the Medfly problem. Some politicians there have voiced increasing frustration with the state’s response to the crisis. But Stanton’s harsh attack stood in sharp contrast to that of many other elected leaders in Orange County who say they see the malathion spraying as a necessary inconvenience.

“When your dog’s got fleas, you don’t wait until they eat up the dog; you go ahead and spray him a bit,” said Garden Grove Vice Mayor J. Tilman Williams. Williams said he would not be surprised to see “a fly or two” in his city soon.

County Supervisor Gaddi H. Vasquez, whose district includes the North County area being sprayed, said: “It seems like this problem is getting bigger and bigger every week . . . . (But) I think we’re doing what we can as far as being supportive of the efforts of the Department of Food and Agriculture.”

Many Westminster area residents, although surprised to hear that the Medfly had reached there, seemed receptive to the idea that their neighborhoods could at some point be sprayed with malathion.

“I don’t see anything wrong with it,” said Susan Brown, 42. “We’re already breathing in enough bad things.”

The County Board of Supervisors next week is scheduled to consider renewing the “state of emergency” declared last month in North County after the first Medfly was discovered. The declaration amounts to a show of moral support for the state’s actions in combatting the fly.

Although state officials do not so far consider the Westminster discovery serious enough to warrant spraying, local leaders nonetheless are expressing fears that the Medfly may have begun moving toward the southern portion of Orange County. That area is home to the great majority of the county’s $225-million-a-year agriculture industry, officials say.

“Every time you find another (fly),” said Frank Parsons, deputy agricultural commissioner for Orange County, “it’s reason for more worry and frustration.”

Entomologists Friday morning dissected the Westminster fly at the regional Medfly Project center in El Monte. They determined that it was not yet sexually developed but that it probably would have been able to reproduce within a week.

“It’s the next worst thing to a pregnant Medfly,” Nisson said. “It’s a wild fly, and we certainly didn’t want to see that.”

Just how state agriculture officials should respond to the detections of not-yet fertile Medflies such as the one found in Westminster has been a gray area in state protocol.

Because the Westminster fly “is an unmated female, the decision might be made just to trap and see if there are more out there,” said William Edwards, a Los Angeles agricultural commissioner who is active in the regionwide Medfly Project, early Friday as agriculture officials were still mulling over which course of action to take. “That’s one school of thought. Or we could go out and treat the area” with malathion “immediately. It could go either way.”

Ultimately, officials decided to wait and see.

“There’s no immediate plan to treat Westminster,” Orange County entomologist Parsons said, “but that doesn’t close out the possibility.”

Parsons said the matter of whether there will be a Westminster spraying might be reconsidered once state agricultural officials come up with a final version of their strategy for multiple sprayings around the Los Angeles Basin.

Discovery of a pregnant Medfly in the Westminster area would almost certainly result in malathion sprayings there, Parsons and other agricultural officials said.

County workers over the weekend will continue to place more traps in Westminster, beginning with a density of 100 per square mile in the area immediately around where the fly was found and decreasing in density from there. It is expected that by next week, there will be more than 2,400 in place in an 81-square-mile-area around the site, as contrasted with the nearly 800 that were there before.

Since the first Medfly was found in the Southland in August, state workers have sprayed pesticide over terrain covering roughly 250 square miles in areas from the San Fernando Valley to northern Orange County. About 1 million residents have been affected.

Despite critics’ questions and a continuing review by the federal government regarding the safety of the spraying, state officials maintain that the mixture of malathion and fly bait used in the sprayings cannot harm human beings. It can, however, stain the paint on cars left exposed during a spraying.

Times staff writers Rose Ellen O’Connor and Ted Johnson contributed to this report.