A Sticky Mess : Fire: Insects and other problems have risen from the ruins of a burned citrus plant in Fallbrook.

They’re almost too small to track individually, and there are too many to swat, and they’ve made life miserable over the past week at Maie Ellis Elementary School in Fallbrook.

Fruit flies.

They’ve been swarming in the shade of campus trees, hiding out in the closets where the kids store their lunches, hovering in the cafeteria and cowering in the corners of classrooms.

And they’re all from next door--birthed within the remaining hulk of a historic lemon packing plant that burned virtually to the ground last August, leaving a legacy of rotting fruit and stagnant fire hose water that pooled in the basement.

“I’m real sick of them,” said an exacerbated Roberta DeLuca, the school’s principal. “This is one of those things you’ve got to put in your book about dumb things they never taught you about in principal school.”

The fruit flies are just one of three problems created by the fire at the packing house, a 73-year-old landmark in the center of downtown Fallbrook that was still operating as the Lemon Twist Plant when it was destroyed in the pre-dawn blaze two months ago.

The water that the 50 firefighters poured on the flames pooled in a basement, mixing with assorted and unidentified chemicals stored there. It was further dirtied by ash, charred wooden timbers and old steel frames.

Michael Page of the Fallbrook Sanitation District figures there are 600,000 gallons of water in the basement, covering the floor to a depth of 1 1/2 feet. But he can’t just pump the water out and into the community’s sewers because it’s filled with the kind of chemical crud that would send the town’s waste-water treatment plant into a biological tizzy.

So the water turned stagnant and smelly, and became a giant birthing ward for mosquitoes. No problem; county vector control officials heard of the problem and sprayed the water with chemicals to kill the larvae. The spraying continues weekly.

What remains is getting rid of the water itself.

Because the fire debris tainted the water, state law prohibits it from being pumped directly into sewers, Page said. Besides, there are various other chemicals in the water--none so bad as to prompt county health officials to declare it technically hazardous, but nonetheless too nasty to be treated at the sewage plant.

“There’s enough toxicity in the water to kill the bugs (bacteria) in my (sewage treatment) water,” Page said. “The bugs treat the sewage sludge, and chemically it’s a delicate balance.”

Page has asked the owners of the plant, Nielsen Citrus Products of Huntington Beach, to line up portable waste-water treatment machinery to give the water a once-over cleaning so it can then be pumped into the sewers. But it might cost $30,000 or so, he said, and the company is balking.

Meanwhile, county health officials want the water drained, too, so they can stop spraying it to control the mosquitoes.

A spokesman for Nielsen Citrus did not return telephone calls.

But while officials say the mosquito problem is being monitored, and that the water isn’t causing anyone any immediate danger because it’s contained within concrete walls and floor, the fruit fly problem erupted about 10 days ago, like some unwelcome fall harvest.

“We opened the door of a supply room, and the flies were so bad the custodian and I decided not even to go in. We just shut the door,” DeLuca said.

Bill Holder, school district superintendent of maintenance operations, called a local pest control company. The school grounds were sprayed last Friday night. On Monday, the flies were back. They were sprayed again that night. They returned again Tuesday. Another spraying. They returned Wednesday. More spraying that night. On Thursday, though in reduced numbers, they were still there.

“We’ll spray every night as long as they’re there,” Holder said.

The county-approved insecticide being used is effective only in the immediate short term and has no residual effects, either on the flies or the students who return the next day, he said.

Through it all, DeLuca said, the children have maintained a good amount of civility. “We’re a rural area, and you’d expect to see things like fruit flies in this area.”

“But we’ve never had a pest like this in the in-town area,” she said. “We didn’t invite these flies to school. We don’t need them for any science projects.”