Fish, Pesticides Pressed Into Battle : Health: They’re being used to kill mosquitoes and rodents breeding in quake-damaged pools, buildings.

To combat another aftereffect of the Northridge earthquake, Los Angeles County health officials said Tuesday that insect-eating fish and pesticides are being used to kill mosquitoes and rodents that are breeding in some quake-damaged pools and buildings.

Testifying before a Los Angeles City Council panel on earthquake recovery, county health officials said a survey of 324 quake-damaged buildings found that nearly 5% of damaged pools had become breeding grounds for mosquitoes and about 2% of vacant buildings were rodent-infested.

In other efforts to rebuild quake-damaged neighborhoods, the Ad Hoc Committee on Earthquake Recovery gave redevelopment officials the preliminary go-ahead to establish quake “recovery areas”--similar to redevelopment areas--where property taxes could be used to back bonds that would finance rebuilding in the hardest hit areas.

And the panel also was told of an increasing trend among residents in quake-damaged areas toward mixing garden waste with quake debris, a mix the city has been hauling away from residential curbsides for free.

The panel instructed the Community Redevelopment Agency to bring the recovery proposal to the entire City Council next week and to draw specific boundaries of the proposed recovery areas--concentrated in the San Fernando Valley--that would be considered in October.

Councilman Hal Bernson, chairman of the quake committee, said after the meeting that the recovery areas will not give city officials the same type of powers to condemn properties that have generated criticism in traditional redevelopment areas throughout the city.

“This won’t be a redevelopment project,” he said.

The mosquito and rodent infestation problems were identified after county health officials conducted a random survey of severely damaged buildings to look for possible quake-related health problems, said Art Tilzer, director of the consumer protection division of the county’s Department of Health Services.

To combat mosquitoes in pools that have not been maintained, Tilzer said mosquito abatement officials decided in February to release into the pools schools of mosquito fish that would eat the insect larvae. Where abatement officials found rats feeding off food in vacant buildings, county health officials either distributed rodent pesticide to neighbors or themselves laced the buildings with the poison, he said.

But Councilman Zev Yaroslavsky, who represents parts of the hard-hit Sherman Oaks area, said complaints to his office about rats from the neighbors of vacant quake-damaged buildings had increased substantially after the Jan. 17 quake, indicating that the problem could be much more serious than the survey indicated.

Most of the complaints have been from neighbors around Colbath Avenue, where city officials have identified one of 13 clusters of particularly troublesome vacant quake-damaged buildings, known as “ghost towns.”

“I have a hard time believing that the problem is less than 5%,” Yaroslavsky said after the panel’s meeting. “My anecdotal evidence indicates that the problem is bigger.”

Yaroslavsky said he believes the rodent problem will diminish as the food supply runs out. But he said he fears the mosquito problem will merely increase with the summer heat.

The ad hoc panel also heard testimony Tuesday on the increasing problem of residents mixing brush and other garden waste with quake debris.

Andres Santamaria, the city’s senior engineer in charge of the quake cleanup, said about 10% of the debris hauled away by city crews now includes green waste, up from only about 2% in the weeks immediately after the quake.

Because the federal emergency money financing the city’s quake cleanup can be used only for quake-related debris, the city will stop hauling away debris that is clearly not a result of the quake, Santamaria said.

Instead, he said, sanitation officials will begin to use ribbons to mark trash they believe is not associated with the quake, leaving it behind for residents to sort through and dispose. Notices also will be placed on non-quake trash, giving residents a phone number to obtain more information on the quake-debris program, he said.

During the meeting, Bernson told Santamaria the panel would leave it up to the discretion of sanitation officials to decide what was acceptable debris for cleanup. But he told them not to be “nit-picking.”

“I think it’s difficult to try to do a police action” during the cleanup efforts, he said.