Bugging Out : Residents Party as Fumigation Sends Cockroaches Reeling

It was a beautiful sight to Jose Guevara.

Hundreds of cockroaches covered the floor, kitchen countertops and furniture at his Boyle Heights apartment on Tuesday. Others were sliding down the walls and dropping from the ceiling.

“There are many, many cucarachas, “ he said with a smile after surveying his first-floor unit at the Ramona Gardens housing complex on Lancaster Street. “But they are dying.”

The 2,600 residents at Los Angeles’ oldest city-run housing project were celebrating its 50th anniversary by staging a do-it-yourself fumigation party in their 498 rental units.

They closed up their food in the refrigerator, rounded up their children and pets and then set off $6,500 worth of bug bombs, donated by a Wisconsin-based insecticide manufacturing firm, in their kitchens and living rooms.

They spent much of the rest of the day sitting outside in their yards waiting for the smoke to clear--and for the housing project’s horde of cockroaches to die.

“It was bad. Not only would we see them when we were eating, but when the kids were sleeping we could see them crawling on them,” Guevara said of his apartment’s infestation.

Neighbor Nieves Carrillo said previous bug-killing expeditions at Ramona Gardens by commercial exterminators seemed to have little effect.

“You’d turn on the kitchen light at night and you’d see hundreds of them. They’d scramble every which way,” she said as she sat on her front porch, baby-sitting a neighbor’s three parakeets and seven goldfish during the three hours that residents were instructed to vacate their apartments.

Isabel Ayala, president of the Ramona Gardens Residents Advisory Council, said past fumigations only seemed to give “hangovers” to the cockroaches. “We’d end up feeling more like we were dying than they were,” she joked. “We’ve decided that if this doesn’t work, we’ll give the project over to the roaches and we’ll move out!”

Genaro Lopez, a Texas biology professor and consulting entomologist for the Raid Center for Insect Control, sponsors of Tuesday’s eradication effort, said tests conducted at Ramona Gardens led to an astronomical estimate of the roach population.

Along with the insecticide foggers, the company gave residents a free three-month supply of baited roach traps for use in catching cockroaches tough enough to survive Tuesday’s spraying, which will help control the infestation but not eradicate it.

“If you see one roach, than you can bet there are 500 others behind your walls,” he said, stopping to sample tacos and flautas cooked up by Ana Maria Carmona for her husband and eight children. The family was eating its lunch while gathered around a television set perched on a folding chair on the sidewalk outside their unit.

“I’m glad we’re doing this,” said Javier Carmona, balancing a plate of his wife’s food on his knee and settling back for a relaxing afternoon watching TV.

Inside his apartment, he could imagine cockroaches dropping like flies.