March 25, 1944: City authorizes first campaign to exterminate mosquitoes
After suffering through one of its worst mosquito plagues the previous summer, city council authorized funding a mosquito-killing program.
City engineer A. W. Haddow, said based on what Winnipeg paid for its program, it would cost Edmonton $10,000-$17,000 a year. The plan consisted of draining sloughs and spreading an environmentally unfriendly diesel oil solution on sloughs that could not be drained.
Without a mosquito control campaign, city alderman feared a repeat of the summer of 1943 when insects breeding on thousands of district sloughs, fed throughout the summer by heavy rains, annoyed residents for more than three months.
Various city organizations had pushed for a mosquitokilling campaign for several years, but any plans developed during the war years had been handicapped by wartime restrictions on the supply of oil and the lack of labour. An easing of restrictions was expected to allow the city enough oil solution to finally carry out a plan that summer.
John H. Brown, the University of Alberta’s mosquito expert, had already forecast a severe outbreak of mosquitoes in the area that summer unless the city proceeded with an extermination plan.
“Such suffering each summer is not necessary,” he said. “Mosquitoes can be controlled. Mosquito abatement programs are carried out in the national parks and many cities.”
In the 1950s the city used plans to spray sloughs with DDT, a commonly used pesticide for insect control, until it was banned in the ’70s.
This year the city expects to start spraying for mosquitoes within the first two weeks of April, depending on snow melting progress and if crews are finding hatching mosquitoes, says Mike Jenkins, the biological sciences technician with the city’s Pest Management Lab.
It’s hard to say if it will be a bad year for skeeters without knowing what’s going to happen with rainfall, “but at this point it actually looks pretty dry out there. It’s looking reasonably good at this point.”
The program, which costs about $1 million annually, targets mosquitoes at the aquatic larval stage. Mosquito eggs lay dormant in vegetation and are activated when melting snow or rainfall fills up the puddles and ponds they’re resting in.
About 80 per cent of the area is treated by helicopter, with ditch trucks treating ditches and ground crews wearing backpacks going into areas that are not accessible by helicopters and in residential areas where there are ponds and development habitat along walkways, Jenkins says. The products they use are deadly only to mosquito and non-toxic to other organisms.