This next storm will have a bite
Harvey’s rain may 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 in two or three weeks,” said 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 whole neighborhood in a couple of hours.
You know all that standing water we have right now? Mosquitoes are laying eggs in it right now — as many as 500 at a time. In a week or two, all those eggs will start to hatch. And before long, we’ll see 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 hyperaware of all the diseases a mosquito can carry.
“I’m kind of nuts about it,” she 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 already. His 4-year-old son played outside Tuesday night and “got torn up” by mosquitoes, he said. “He’s got welts everywhere.”
Barcomb’s 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 may be worse because we’re now worried about so many more mosquito-borne diseases.
Our local mosquitoes could be carrying five different 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 they’re the most concentrated, then strategically spraying insecticide to get rid of them.
Mosquito Control staffers will head out across Harris County soon after this new round of mosquitoes has hatched, Debboun said. They’ll do what’s called a “landing count,” which involves a brave Mosquito Control technician standing still for one minute and counting the number of mosquitoes that land on him.
If it’s five to 10, there’s not a problem. If it’s 100 or more, Debboun said, “that’s a situation.”
Most of those areas can be treated with trucks that spray insecticide up and down the streets. If there’s a high landing count across a widespread area, Debboun said, “we’re going to need a plane to come over and pour (insecticide) all over.” The Public Health department ordered an aerial drop after Hurricane Ike in 2008 and again in 2014 to get rid of mosquitoes carrying West Nile.
Debboun’s hoping it doesn’t come to that. But either way, he said, we shouldn’t freak out about it yet. Wear mosquito repellent, get rid of all the standing water you can, and use common sense.
And it may 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. “But we’ll always have mosquitoes in Houston and Harris County. It’s almost like a tropical area.”