Taking a Bite Out of Mosquitoes

On most Thursdays, Jacquie Spoehel, an entomological assistant with the Southeast Mosquito Abatement District, works in monotonous isolation, accompanied only by the FM radio as she drives her government pickup truck around the Valley to empty a series of mosquito traps and then returns to a lab to count her catch.

But this Thursday is unusual for Spoehel. The former Peace Corps volunteer and junior high school biology teacher is sharing the seat of her truck with a reporter curious about her daily routine. The reporter’s presence means Spoehel also must share the cab with Sabrina Brummond, the mosquito district’s first-ever public information officer. Pest control has discovered spin control in the San Fernando Valley.

“I think we’re putting more of an emphasis on letting the public know what we’re doing,” Spoehel says as she describes changes under way at the district, an agency that sprays insecticide and coordinates other abatement measures for roughly 30 cities and communities in Los Angeles County.

Spoehel isn’t kidding. Brummond, a blond-haired former Humboldt County television reporter and anchorwoman whose gregariousness masks her savvy, was hired by the district this month to bring mosquito management into the media age. She stopped covering the news in order to make it, and she pursues her new career with devotion and skill.

If Brummond succeeds at her mission, Valley homeowners no longer will allow puddles of water--puddles that provide fertile breeding grounds for mosquitoes--to collect on their lawns or in their drained swimming pools. “A whole generation grew up with recycling,” she says as she sits in the district’s truck clutching a briefcase containing various papers and a can of hair spray. “We’re going to teach them about back yards.”

In the long term, Brummond hopes to publish a new promotional pamphlet for district customers, produce an instructional video for employees and launch a school-based program to teach area children about the biology of the bothersome bugs.

Right now, however, bolder moves are necessary to push the abatement district into the public’s eye, such as staging a confrontation with employees of the Los Angeles Department of Water and Power and ensuring that a local television camera is there to capture the event in full color.

On Aug. 7, Brummond and others from the mosquito district met with DWP officials and residents to discuss ways to alleviate a mosquito infestation of a 10-acre pond and marsh in the Chatsworth Reservoir. The water level in the pond has risen recently as silt from nearby construction sites has fallen in. The DWP, which owns the reservoir, agreed to lower the water level and cut away reeds growing along the shore that provide a safe place for mosquitoes to lay eggs.

This week, Brummond said, a mosquito control official inspecting the reservoir noticed that a pipe was pumping water into, rather than out of, the pond at full speed. Confident she had found a smoking gun, the woman whose agency is charged with ridding the air of mosquitoes began filling it with heat.

Brummond called two television stations and told them to meet her near the pond. A newspaper reporter coincidentally had arranged to accompany Spoehel and Brummond on that day and was not aware of the television spectacle that loomed ahead.

At midmorning, Spoehel turns the district’s pickup truck into an empty lot near the Chatsworth Reservoir. Within minutes, in a rendezvous whose discretion suggests Brummond has studied Woodward and Bernstein, a white minivan driven by a Channel 4 cameraman turns into the lot, followed by a blue Nissan coupe with reporter Vikki Vargas at the wheel.

Hands are shaken, basic facts about the Chatsworth Reservoir story are exchanged, and Vargas appears unimpressed. But she and her cameraman lead Brummond to their van and, with Spoehel following in her pickup, drive to the locked gate surrounding the pond.

Several hundred yards in the distance, seven DWP workers wearing fluorescent orange vests stand idly by a bulldozer, taking a break from the day’s work. Unbeknown to them, Brummond senses blood. She approaches Spoehel’s pickup truck and, fearing a DWP worker will try to block her entrance, says excitedly: “Let me have my badge.”

But the DWP’s troops allow the mosquito entourage to pass unmolested to the far side of the pond, and then to the intake pipe that two days before was pouring water into the pond.

Now, to the press officer’s visible disappointment, the pipe is emitting nothing but a steady drip. “It was turned off,” Brummond insists. “Now it’s coming out at a trickle. But it was turned off.”

The DWP later confirms that the intake pipe was temporarily gushing water, but says the agency had accidentally pumped out too much and was simply restoring the pond to the agreed-upon level.

“We’re just caught in the middle,” says a DWP official.

Spoehel feels the same way.

Nobody told her when she took this job that counting mosquitoes in the privacy of a lab would require talking to thousands through the lens of a camera.

Not to worry, though. Sabrina Brummond is highly qualified to spread over the airwaves the gospel of the Southeast Mosquito Abatement District, as she demonstrates when she replaces Spoehel as the subject of the television interview.

“The story’s easy,” Brummond later says reassuringly to Spoehel, who is nervous that she performed poorly on film. Brummond knows exactly what kind of story Vargas will air that afternoon, she says. “I gave her bites she could use.”