Bitten by the Legal Bug : Fleas Make Life Tough for Staff in Temporary Courthouse Trailers

Christopher Koch was minding his own business, doing the chores that fill a courtroom clerk’s day, when he sensed the swirl about his ankles.

He peeked under his desk in Van Nuys. Fleas were sampling his shoes. Fleas were dining on his socks. Fleas were nipping on his pants. Incredible numbers of fleas were in the air, swarming about like a cyclone, leaping up through a hole in the courtroom floor.

“I saw fleas everywhere,” Koch said. “It was absolutely, positively disgusting.”

Then the jokes began. Why, the courthouse is abuzz with flea bargaining. Anyone want to cop a flea?

In trailers just north of the main seven-story courthouse, structures pressed into service as make-do courtrooms because of the Jan. 17 Northridge earthquake, there exists what an internal memo concedes is a “severe infestation of fleas.”

No cases have been scratched from the dockets, court officials said. But court staffers and judges are itching for a solution.

Koch was the first to notice the “pest problem,” as the July 8 memo terms it, when he became a flea feast earlier this month. “I couldn’t believe it,” he said.

The trailers, about the size of mobile homes, are semi-permanent fixtures on the court landscape. They were once used for Juvenile Court duty. That ended about two years ago and, for many months, they stood empty.

Then came the earthquake, which put the San Fernando Superior Court out of commission until at least next spring. San Fernando judges moved into the Van Nuys courthouse; to make room, judges had to be farmed out to the seven courtrooms in the trailers.

Like mobile homes taken off the road, the trailers do not sit directly on the ground. Instead, they are perched a few inches off the soil, fixed on blocks.

That arrangement creates a crawl space--perfect for cats, rats, possums, squirrels and other animals.

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“Unfortunately, some of these animals do have a tendency to take refuge under a trailer or a house, any structure, because they want to have their own hiding places,” said Frank Hall, chief of the county health department’s Vector-Borne Disease Program, which oversees the fight against such disease transmitters--or “vectors”--as fleas, ticks, rats and mites.

“And, well, these animals do tend to have flea problems, especially in the summer, because the reproduction cycle increases as the temperature rises.”

In early July, Koch, a clerk for Superior Court Judge John Farrell, saw the swarm beneath his desk, coming up through a hole cut in the floor for an electrical cable.

Trying to assess the damage, Koch said, he took his shoe off and rolled up his cuff. He found fleas “all the way across” the top of his sock.

In another room in the trailers, attorney Mary Sauve also began encountering fleas. She ended up with 30 bites.

A security guard in the hallway, R. F. James, topped that--42 bites.

Koch, meanwhile, got ticked off. He trapped seven fleas and taped them to a sheet of paper from a telephone message pad. He presented the evidence to Farrell, who quickly called for help from court administrators.

“It made the rest of us start scratching, just thinking about it,” Yaras said.

Initially, according to the July 8 memo written by court administrator Timothy Adams, it was believed that stray cats were the source of the fleas.

So far, security guard James said, the crawl space has yielded six dead kittens and two possums.

A first blast of fumigation, the weekend of July 9-10, was apparently not enough to kill all the fleas, Adams said. It also left behind a chemical stench so strong that most of the trailer courtrooms doors were open throughout the week.

With the doors open, the noise and fumes of buses lurching down the street, just a few paces away from the front entrance to the trailers, roared regularly into the courtrooms. Occasionally, trucks from the fire station down the block contributed more fumes and sirens.

“It’s very loud. Very hard to hear,” said Judge William MacLaughlin. “But it’s preferable to (the fumigation) odor.” Jurors have not registered any complaints, at least officially, bailiffs and clerks said.

Exterminators are due back. Adams promises that fumigation will continue until “the problem with the fleas no longer exists.” He also vowed to board up the crawl spaces.

The cost of the flea-eradication campaign, Adams said, is uncertain.

“If it’s not an earthquake, it’s fleas,” Koch said in a burst of biting social commentary. “It’s always something.”