The Alligator Weed Man Is on a Mission to Root Out All Evil : ‘We’ve made an awful lot of headway and it’s not been easy or cheap.’
Alligator weed may not bite, but it’s got a hell of a stranglehold on Jim Hartman.
Hartman’s sole mission as a county agricultural inspector is to kill every last shred of the South American pest, a reed-like plant that, left unchecked, forms huge mats that could dam up Los Angeles’ entire flood-control system and annihilate every native species in its path.
Nearly as tenacious as the infamous Medfly, alligator weed keeps springing up in Los Angeles County despite a 26-year, $2-million effort by various government agencies to stamp it out. At the height of the infestation in the early 1970s, nearly a dozen workers took to boats, bicycles and all-terrain vehicles in search of the prolific weed.
Now there’s only Hartman, 33, who with part-time help from a state worker has the unenviable task of ferreting out the last few interlopers from among the other hollow-stemmed plants that resemble it. Four days a week, 10 hours a day, rain or shine, for an annual salary of about $40,000, Hartman dons hip waders and trudges through rivers and streams in the San Gabriel Valley to look for his nemesis.
Left alone, the mats formed by the weed are as thick as they are strong, capable of supporting the weight of a human being. To kill the plant, Hartman has to take every scrap to a landfill and bury it under three inches of concrete or six feet of dirt to prevent the broken stems from regenerating.
“I’ve seen it after it’s been in a plastic bag for almost a year and it was still sending up shoots,” Hartman said with a shudder. “Just a little moisture is all it takes.”
Despite the plant’s resiliency, county officials are optimistic that they are gaining the upper hand. They estimate that it now covers only about a seventh of an acre total, down from 125 acres in 1970.
But the problem is that it remains spread out over about nine square miles in the San Gabriel Valley, not conveniently bunched in one spot. So far this fiscal year, Hartman has found 10 times as much as his predecessor did the year before, largely because the plant thrived in 1993’s wet weather.
“Every time we think we have it licked, we find one more spot,” said Richard Whiteman, Hartman’s boss.
But he and state officials say it would be foolhardy to give up now that they may be close to eradicating the plant.
“We’ve made an awful lot of headway and it’s not been easy or cheap,” Whiteman said. “If we let up at this point, we’ll be right back to where we were.”
Experts disagree about how alligator weed first got its grip on the county. Native to Argentina and other parts of South America, the plant may have hitched a ride to the United States by clinging to rocks that were used as ship ballast and later dumped over the side. It also was commonly used as packing material in the 19th Century before Styrofoam was invented. It’s also possible that a nursery may have imported it for ornamental use.
Regardless of how it landed, Alternanthera philoxeroides was soon dubbed alligator weed by biologists who believed that the amphibians helped spread the infestation in Florida by dragging stems from place to place as they searched for wet areas during the dry season, Hartman said.
It was first observed in Los Angeles County in 1956 at the bottom of the Rio Hondo River in El Monte. It was later found in Tulare, Kings and San Diego counties, but has been virtually eradicated there, state officials said.
Alarmed at the proliferation of the weed in the Southeast, the federal government in 1959 bred two natural predator insects in Argentina--the flea beetle and stem borer--that by the early 1970s had succeeded in controlling the Southeast’s problem. (The plant is said to be eradicated if it fails to reappear in any given spot for three straight years.)
It was a different story in Los Angeles County, where the tropical flea beetles failed to survive several winters in the mid- and late 1960s. Some federal researchers fault state and county officials at the time for giving up too easily on the insects. The state gave the weed an “A” rating that identified it as a public threat, but relied on herbicides and manual removal instead of insects.
The county’s eradication effort was complicated by the fact that developers had been permitted to take soil filled with alligator weed from the Whittier Narrows Dam area and use it to grade dozens of housing tracts in Montebello.
A widespread public education campaign and constant visits by government workers in the late 1960s and early 1970s succeeded in eradicating the weed from most back yards, county officials said. But Hartman said local residents using the bike path that parallels the San Gabriel River still occasionally greet him as he toils along the banks by saying, “Hey, you must be the alligator weed man.”
Today, soil from the dam area can be used only under asphalt or concrete, and part of Hartman’s job is to inspect the undersides of bulldozers and other earthmoving equipment to make sure no alligator weed is inadvertently transported elsewhere. “A lot of people don’t understand, but there’s a term for things like alligator weed-- biological pollutants, “ said Nathan Dechoretz, supervisor of the state’s weed and vertebrate control and eradication program.
Hartman doesn’t need convincing.
“I’m hoping we can get this thing in the next five years,” he said. “But as with any biological agent, we just don’t know.”
