Inspector Wrestles With Alligatorweed : Agriculture: His job is to destroy all traces of the vinelike predator. It could dam up L.A.’s flood-control system.
Alligatorweed 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 vinelike predator 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 or the South’s kudzu vine, alligatorweed 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 Hartman, 33, who 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. A state employee aids him in his quest three days a week.
When Hartman spots the perennial, he must dig down at least 5 feet to uproot it, hack it to pieces with a shovel and toss the waste into a thick black plastic bag. But the resilient weed easily absorbs that much punishment and more without giving up. Left alone, the mats formed by the weed are as thick as they are strong, capable of withstanding the weight of a human being.
To kill it, Hartman has to take every last scrap to a landfill and bury it under 3 inches of concrete, or 6 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 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 last season’s wet weather, he said.
“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. It’d be a shame to waste all those hours of work.”
The story of how alligatorweed got a grip on the county--and Hartman--starts in the 1870s in the Alabama port city of Mobile, where it was first discovered.
Native to South America, the plant may have hitched a ride to the United States by clinging to rocks that were used as ballast and later dumped over the side, said Ted Center, a researcher with the aquatic plant control division of the U.S. Department of Agriculture.
Another theory holds that the weed arrived via the mail because it was commonly used as packing material in the 19th Century before Styrofoam was invented, said Al Cofrancesco, a research etymologist with the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers.
But county officials blame the Corps of Engineers, which they say inadvertently imported it when it stuck to the underside of heavy machinery that was used in South America and then brought to the San Gabriel Valley to build the Whittier Narrows Dam. Naturally, the corps regards that theory as improbable, Cofrancesco said.
Yet another version has a nursery importing the stuff for use as an ornamental. Imagine the surprise on the face of the hapless homeowner who woke up one day to find the fast-growing plant with innocent white flowers in the spring had taken over his lawn, said Nathan Dechoretz, supervisor of the state’s weed and vertebrate control and eradication program.
“The trouble is that probably all the stories may be somewhat true,” Center said. “All I can give you is the most widely accepted guess.”
Regardless of how it landed, Alternanthera philoxeroides was soon dubbed alligatorweed by biologists who believed that the reptiles helped spread the infestation in Florida by dragging stems from place to place in search of wet areas during the dry season, Hartman said. The plant was first observed in Los Angeles County in 1956 by a county employee who noted that it was sending awfully deep taproots into the bottom of the Rio Hondo River in El Monte, said Doug Barbe, a taxonomist with the California Department of Food and Agriculture, which keeps records on such things. 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 USDA and the corps in 1959 opened a research lab in Argentina with the intention of breeding the plant’s natural insect predators and exporting them to the United States, Cofrancesco said. Three bugs were bred, and two--the alligatorweed flea beetle and the stem borer--had succeeded by the early 1970s in making a huge dent in the Southeast’s problem. The plant is now considered under control, though not totally eradicated there, Center said. (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. Center faults state and county officials at the time for giving up too easily on the insects. The state gave the weed an “A” rating identifying it as a public threat, but relied on herbicides and manual removal instead of insects.
“It’s still a common problem in bio-control programs--people panic and don’t trust experimental methods like insects,” Center said. “So they use other means to reduce the number of plants to the point where there’s not enough for the bugs to survive on. Then they still have to go after the remaining plants, but they are progressively harder and harder to find.”
The county’s eradication effort was complicated by the fact that developers had been permitted to take soil filled with alligatorweed from the Whittier Narrows Dam area and use it to grade dozens of housing tracts in Montebello.
A massive 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 alligatorweed 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 earth-moving equipment to make sure no alligatorweed is inadvertently transported elsewhere when the equipment is moved. Hartman likes his job because he gets to work outdoors. But he’s not particularly fond of the weed, an antipathy shared by every official interviewed for this story. They described alligatorweed as “noxious,” “aggressive,” “evasive,” “nasty,” “horrible,” “unwanted” and even “feral.”
“The average person thinks a plant is a plant, but it’s not,” said Dechoretz, the state official. “A lot of people don’t understand, but there’s a term for things like alligatorweed--biological pollutants. They upset the balance of nature. They can be worse than most chemical pollutants because they don’t break down over time. They multiply.”
Hartman doesn’t need convincing.
“I suppose someone could see this as a silly thing to do,” he said, “but I take my job very seriously. I’m hoping we can get this thing in the next five years. But as with any biological agent, we just don’t know.”
