On the Beat, Licensed to Kill
Jon Miller isn’t sure what to expect. It’s a few minutes before 9 on a fog-shrouded morning and a neighbor of this seedy-looking house in Cypress has put in a call to the mosquito police.
Which is why Miller is here. He carries a badge.
Miller, 47, is an inspector for Orange County Vector Control, which sounds vaguely like some intergalactic bureaucracy. Vector Control’s mission, though, is real: to eradicate rats, mosquitoes and other pests that can spread infectious diseases to humans.
Spring and early summer are prime mosquito season in Southern California, an oddity in itself. In rainy climates, mosquitoes are as unavoidable as clouds. Here in the semidesert they should be rare.
But it’s our yearning for greenery that brings them on. That and untended swimming pools, or even forgotten buckets of rainwater in the backyard. Those little reservoirs pick up where nature left off by creating spawning grounds for 19 varieties of mosquitoes.
At least three of the mosquito varieties can transmit encephalitis, an occasionally fatal disease that causes swelling of the brain or spinal column. Several other varieties found here also are considered “competent hosts” for the West Nile virus, another potentially fatal disease that has cropped up on the East Coast but so far has not been reported in the West.
So there is a serious undercurrent to what seems a humorous endeavor: calling in the mosquito police.
“Neighbors are always anxious to turn in their neighbors,” Miller says, holding a long-handled scooping cup as he prepares to walk up to the Cypress house. “We sometimes have people come to the door with guns.”
Not today, though.
Miller, a soft-spoken father of three who does missionary work in Russia each summer, looks over the house, a single-story stucco with light blue trim and loose roof shingles. Patches of dirt spot the dying lawn and a small sign near the frontdoor reads, “This house was clean yesterday. Sorry you missed it.”
Looking like a cross between Marlin Perkins and a beat cop, Badge No. 202 clipped to his belt, Miller rings the bell. After a few moments the inside door opens, revealing a man disheveled from sleep and wearing sweatpants and a T-shirt. The man holds a dog behind him with his hand as Miller states his case. The man explains that he plans to drain the pool in a couple of weeks. Miller says he needs to see it anyway.
The homeowner lets Miller in through a side gate and there it is: an above-ground pool whose stagnant water has gone green. Swimming in the murk are the telltale one-sixteenth-inch wrigglers--mosquito larvae, which in a few days will be full-grown mosquitoes foraging for warm blood. Miller casts into the water a handful of pellets made of ground corn and a compound that will solidify in the larvae’s digestive tract, killing them.
Case closed.
Miller also notices a couple of pails with standing water and pours them out.
“I can probably find something like this in almost every backyard,” Miller says.
Within minutes, he’s on his way to the next stop.
When you’re a mosquito hunter, you move around. There are 13 vector control agencies covering Southern California, five in Los Angeles County alone. One agency covers all of Orange County and each of its 17 inspectors has a set area. And each handles pest complaints that range far beyond mosquitoes. There are fire ants to extinguish, rats to poison and Africanized bees to identify and remove.
As he drives, Miller decides to check for mosquitoes in a drainage ditch east of Beach Boulevard. He scampers down the side of the concrete-lined ditch and peers into the shallow water but sees nothing other than litter--some paper cups and plastic bags and a wire refrigerator shelf. He scampers back up and moves to an area where the water settles into deeper pools.
And there they are. Egg rafts floating on the surface and early-stage larvae wriggling below.
Miller drops tidbits of information into his conversation as he works. Vector inspectors are legally empowered to enter private property if there’s a health issue involved. Most people are cooperative, primarily because the inspectors usually are called by residents who’ve been getting bit by bugs or have seen rats.
But sometimes the residents aren’t so happy to see them.
“A couple times a summer we need to have the police come with us,” Miller says.
He looks at the drainage basin and contemplates his options. A little poison, maybe. Or a spritz of diesel oil that will smother the wriggling larvae before evaporating in about four hours. Perhaps a handful of mosquito fish will do the trick, inch-long Gambusia affinis guppies that can eat more than 100 larvae a day.
Lots of options.
Miller decides on a mix. He tosses a handful of guppies into the larger of two pools and sprays the smaller, the diesel oil spreading over the surface in psychedelic eddies of colors. He makes a note to return in a couple of months to check on the fish, then he’s off again.
The final mosquito call of the day turns out to be one of his favorites: an educated consumer.
Mike and Almeta Hensley have lived in their small, neat Stanton home for 31 years, enjoying the pool in the backyard as first their children and then their grandchildren played in it. But the pool hasn’t been used much in recent years, and with electricity rates about to spike, Mike Hensley has decided to shut off the pump and filter.
He knows about mosquitoes, and mosquito fish. So after the pool sat idle for three weeks, Hensley called Vector Control and asked if someone could come by and turn his in-ground pool into an in-ground aquarium.
Miller pulls up to the house, the front rimmed with manicured shrubs and blood-red amaryllis. Carrying a white plastic 10-gallon bucket full of mosquito fish, Miller is directed to the back by Hensley’s wife, where he finds Hensley working near the pool. Miller peers into the depths, asking Hensley how long it has been since he last put in chlorine.
Three weeks, Hensley says. That should be enough time for it to have evaporated, making it safe for the mosquito fish. Miller scoops about 20 out in a net and sprinkles a few at a time into the pool, where they sink motionless for a few seconds before wriggling a bit, then scooting off.
Hensley talks for a few minutes about his life in the house and how sad he made his pool man of 16 years when Hensley told him he wouldn’t be needed anymore. Hensley is ambivalent himself about shutting off the pool, as full of memories as it is of water.
“Once the electric rates settle down, I may turn it back on,” Hensley says.
As Hensley talks, Miller drifts away, eyeing a couple of buckets at the edge of the patio near Hensley’s lush avocado and grapefruit trees. Miller peers at the stagnant water inside and asks, “Do you mind?” Without waiting for the answer, he begins emptying the buckets over the tree roots.
Such is the life of the mosquito police: to protect and spill.
