Harvey’s gone.
Here come the mosquitoes
Hurricane Harvey’s rain might have left Houston behind, but there’s another storm headed our way. It’s a cloud of mosquitoes, which breed in standing water and soon will be hatching by the millions.
“It’s going to be horrible” before long, predicted Cory Barcomb, operations manager for Mosquito Squad, a Houston mosquito-control service.
He’s bracing for the onslaught, bringing in heavy-duty insecticide sprayers from Austin that can cover a neighborhood in a couple of hours.
You know all that standing water we’ve had since the storms? Mosquitoes have been laying eggs in it — as many as 500 at a time. All those eggs take a week or two to hatch, which means we’re due for a mosquito boom that will have us swatting and scratching for weeks.
“There’s no way around them,” said Dr. Mustapha Debboun, director of Harris County Public Health’s mosquito and vector control division. “Once they find water, they’re going to lay eggs.”
Chanteé Hale has been warning her friends and family about the impending bloodsucker boom. Hale is a public health nurse, so she’s aware of all the diseases that mosquitoes can carry.
“I’m kind of nuts about it,” Hale said. “My family knows if we walk outside for anything, you shut the door immediately. And you spray yourself with bug spray before you go out.”
Hale lives in southwest Houston. Her house and yard didn’t flood, but she knows standing water is everywhere: “We’ve got a bayou that’s pretty full, just sitting there.”
Barcomb, who lives in Katy, said he’s seen his share of mosquitoes. His 4-year-old son played outside one night after the storm and “got torn up” by mosquitoes, he said. “He’s got welts everywhere.”
Barcomb is bracing for the biting to get worse. He remembers 2001’s Tropical Storm Allison, which hit the Gulf Coast just as he was getting started in the pest-control business.
“It was bad,” he said, but Harvey’s aftermath might be worse because we’re now worried about so many more mosquitoborne diseases.
Our local mosquitoes could be carrying five viruses, according to Debboun: West Nile, St. Louis encephalitis, dengue, chikungunya and Zika.
That’s why Harris County Public Health will be studying the mosquito population to figure out where it is the most concentrated, then strategically spraying insecticide to get rid of them.
The Public Health Department has ordered an aerial drop — just as it did after Hurricane Ike in 2008 and again in 2014 — to get rid of mosquitoes carrying West Nile.
“We’re going to need a plane to come over and pour (insecticide) all over,” Debboun said.
His advice? Wear mosquito repellent, get rid of all the standing water you can and use common sense.
It might get bad, but there’s an end to the mosquito boom in sight: Fall is on the way.
“Once the days get shorter, the temperatures get cooler, the numbers will start dwindling,” Debboun said.