Orange County Medfly Spray Zone to Be Widened

In a dramatic expansion of the state’s aerial assault on the Mediterranean fruit fly, agriculture officials announced plans Tuesday to spray pesticide over a 36-square-mile swath of Orange County as many as a dozen times by summer.

The decision means that nearly 200,000 people in Garden Grove, Westminster and six adjacent cities near two recent Medfly discoveries will be advised this month to stay indoors, cover their cars and take other precautions during periodic sprayings of a malathion-bait mixture.

In a partial break from past policies, state strategists decided to spray not only the area around last week’s discovery of a pregnant Medfly in Garden Grove, but also a bordering, previously untreated region near the trapping last month of a non-pregnant fly in Westminster.

“We want to err on the side of doing more than we need to do, rather than less,” said Frank Parsons, Orange County deputy agricultural commissioner. “There’s a lot at risk.”

The first aerial application for the new Garden Grove-Westminster spray area is set for the night of Jan. 25. It becomes the second malathion target in Orange County--the Brea area was sprayed three times in the last two months--as agriculture officials wage a difficult battle to stop the spread of the crop-destroying pest.

The densely populated spray region includes virtually all of Garden Grove, about half of Westminster, and parts of Cypress, Stanton, Huntington Beach, Santa Ana, Orange and Anaheim. It ends just south of Disneyland.

Yet even as state officials in Sacramento defended their campaign against the Medfly, some environmentalists and politicians continued Tuesday to question state assertions about malathion’s safety and vowed to mount opposition.

“This is unbelievable,” Randall Toler of Fullerton, a longtime activist who heads a small environmental group called the Green Party, said of the new spray plan. “It’s a total overreaction on the part of the state. This means total war. We’ll have to pull out all the stops now to try and stop the spraying.”

Toler, who helped put together the county’s only malathion demonstration to date in Brea earlier this month, promised to explore legal and legislative means, as well as a possible public initiative, to derail the state policy.

Official Confident

He got some support Tuesday night in Huntington Beach. Two council members expressed concern about the state’s plan to extend the malathion spraying to parts of the city. Councilman Peter M. Green, an instructor in biology at Golden West College, said he plans to introduce a resolution Monday questioning the spraying and asking the state to explore alternatives.

“I have serious concerns about malathion,” Green said. “I don’t think we yet know the full story on that pesticide. I do know that some studies have shown that the pesticide is harmful on chicken embryos, an indication it might cause chromosomal damage.”

Huntington Beach Mayor Thomas J. Mays also expressed concern.

“I share Peter’s feelings on this,” the mayor said. “We got very little notice about the spraying and all we know is that it will be held in Huntington Beach sometime next week.”

But in Sacramento, the state’s top agriculture official told members of the Senate Agriculture and Water Resources Committee on Tuesday that, despite the campaign’s critics, the Medfly battle will be won.

“Everything is working,” said Henry J. Voss, director of the state Department of Food and Agriculture. “We will probably find more flies, but I am confident we have the infestation under control and will complete eradication by the middle of the year.”

Most elected officials in Orange County also said that they believe that the malathion spraying is the best, if not the only, way to avoid a repeat of the Medfly’s 1981 devastation of state agriculture and halt its spread to South County, the heart of Orange County’s $225-million-a-year produce industry.

“So long as there is evidence of infestation, the spraying is absolutely necessary,” Sen. Marian Bergeson (R-Newport Beach) said in a telephone interview after Voss’ testimony. “It appears to be the only answer right now.”

Other elected leaders agreed.

In Garden Grove, a city of about 140,000 that is almost entirely within the new spray area, the City Council on Monday refused to ask the County Board of Supervisors to rescind its largely symbolic vote of support for the state’s malathion spraying.

Councilman Raymond J. Littrell, a spraying critic, said, “I’ve talked to a lot of people about the Medfly spraying, and I didn’t find one person who thought it was good for them.” His resolution of opposition was defeated, 3 to 2.

And in Westminster, where about half of the city’s 73,000 residents may be in the spray area, Mayor Charles V. Smith said in an interview: “This is just one of those necessary evils. The spraying may be a little overkill, but if it’s needed for the economic good, we’ll cooperate and live with it.”

Like other supporters of the spray policy, Smith said he does not believe the malathion used in low doses during aerial applications poses a substantial health risk.

The Medfly, which attacks about 260 varieties of produce, was first spotted this season near Dodger Stadium in August and has been found dozens of times since then around the San Fernando and San Gabriel valleys, Los Angeles and northern Orange County.

State officials responded initially with a single malathion application in infested areas. Then, deciding they may have underestimated the problem, the officials stepped up their attack with plans for as many as 12 rounds of spraying in each target area.

An eight-square-mile area of North County that includes parts of Brea, Fullerton and La Habra has been doused three times so far after a November trapping of a pregnant Medfly and several nearby finds in southern Los Angeles County.

The December discovery of a Medfly in Westminster triggered fears that the bug may have been heading south. But because the specimen was sexually immature and had not mated, agriculture officials decided then not to spray the area.

That was until last Wednesday. A pregnant Medfly caught in a Garden Grove orange tree signaled that, despite their best hopes, local agricultural officials were not rid of the pest. And they moved into action.

While state scientific protocol dictates only that spraying take place around the discovery of a pregnant Medfly, officials also decided to spray the area around the Westminster find--and everywhere in between.

“We wanted to be on the safe side,” said Gera Curry of the state Department of Food and Agriculture. “Chances are that there are other pregnant females in that area that just haven’t shown up in our trapping. So if the spraying needs to be done, we’d rather do it now than later.”

Orange County agriculture official Parsons said the county backed the state’s decision to spray the entire area, despite the headaches it may mean.

“Obviously, the more communities we have (sprayed), the more reasons for questions, inquiries, anxieties, apprehensions by residents. So it’s going to be a real busy time for us in community relations,” he said. “But this is something that just has to be done.”

Staff writers Bill Billiter in Orange County and Ashley Dunn in Sacramento, plus Jennifer Moulton and James Tortolano, contributed to this story.