LOWLAND -- State budget cuts have left counties hit hard by Hurricane Irene struggling against a post-storm swarm of mosquitoes that is raising fears of an outbreak of diseases such as West Nile virus and is hindering cleanup and repair efforts in some areas.
This past summer, the legislature eliminated the five-member state team that monitored mosquito populations, counseled state and local officials on how to control the pests, and oversaw grants to local governments for mosquito control.
After previous hurricanes, such as Floyd in 1999, state officials hired contractors to spray affected counties and then sought reimbursement from the Federal Emergency Management Agency in a single application. This time, state officials are telling counties they have to handle the spraying and complex applications for reimbursement themselves - along with the risk that they won't be reimbursed.
The state is offering to pay a quarter of the cost; but the affected counties include some of the state's poorest, and all have tight budgets. Leaders of some counties are balking at the risk, no matter how small, that they won't get the money back.
Among them is Pamlico County, where a few days ago Bruce Harrison of Clemmons, an internationally-known expert on mosquitoes, said he found the highest concentrations of the insect that he has ever encountered in the United States.
This week, though, the county commissioners decided against spending $200,000 on aerial spraying, considered a critical method for knocking down large outbreaks.
Instead, the board decided to spend $20,000 to buy another spray truck, repair one that was broken down and cover the cost of stronger chemicals and the overtime and contract labor to keep four spray trucks on the road for long hours to fight the clouds of insects.
"Hopefully, we'll be able to get good results if we stay after it," said County Manager Tim Buck. "Our goal is to spray every road every other day, and we feel confident we can make a dent in the population."
The commissioners, he said, felt they couldn't justify the risk of spending so much on aerial spraying if they won't get reimbursed, particularly given that the hurricane had created so many needs.
That doesn't cut it with people like Randy Caroon, a resident of Pamlico's Lowland community where dozens of houses were flooded. Harrison, while working for a private contractor, counted more than 200 mosquitoes a minute landing on him when he stopped there.
"I'd like to know what they think they've got that's more important to spend that money on," Caroon said Thursday. "People up-county who don't have to deal with it just have no idea how bad it is."
Intolerable swarms
Caroon said he's accustomed to being bitten more than city residents, but the current swarm has been intolerable. A few days ago, he was cleaning storm debris out of his mother's yard and felt like he was nearly drained of blood.
"I got in the bathtub, and just laying there, it felt like they were still biting me," he said.
For decades, Harrison, who was part of the state team that was eliminated, has sacrificed himself for science, offering his body to mosquitoes then counting how many land to suck his blood. That's a standard method for determining the insects' population density. The swarms are so thick in some coastal counties flooded by Hurricane Irene, though, that in places he declined to leave the safety of his truck.
"When you drive up and see that your left window is covered with them, and then you notice your right window is covered, and your windshield, too, it just doesn't make sense to get out," he said.
That from a man who has a mosquito species named after him.
Harrison was on the coast this week checking mosquito populations as a consultant for an aerial spray company. He has been sent in after a host of storms over the years, including hurricanes Floyd and Katrina, and said he's never seen conditions in the U.S. this bad.
A threshold sometimes used for aerial spraying is when more than 100 females - the gender that bites - caught in a small trap overnight. A trap in Beaufort County that might normally catch 50 mosquitoes overnight got more than 14,000 in one night the week after the storm, said Eugene McRoy, an environmental health program specialist with the county health department.
"That week after the storm was really bad, and we're continuing to see high populations because we're seeing those mosquitoes that came after the storm, and at the same time new populations continue to come out," he said. "People are trying to clean up from the storm and do repairs, but it's really hard for them to go outside in some places."
Inland, some of the mosquito problems are due to other species, but in the coastal areas where the flooding struck, the culprits are two species, the black and brown marsh mosquitoes, which lay their eggs near, but not in, brackish water. The eggs, which can last a few years, hatch when they are submerged.
This outbreak may include years of eggs, and has gone on long enough now that it's being replenished by freshly-laid eggs. The cycle won't stop until the rain backs off, or until a cold snap kills them, something that's likely weeks away.
The two species' have odd habits that make them a blood-sucking tag team on humans. The larger brown variety starts low, biting the legs, and then works its way up the body. The black species starts high, on the upper body, and works down.
Aerial spraying is preferable in many situations, Harrison said, because it can cover far more territory. Trucks may be able to spray a swath 60 feet or so wide, but as soon as the spray disperses, winds will carry mosquitoes into the area, or they'll fly in on their own, sometimes covering miles in the case of these salt marsh species.
Seeking FEMA's help
After Hurricane Floyd in 1999, which caused much more widespread flooding, more than 30 counties were sprayed from the air, and the operation lasted nearly a month. Before the spraying all exceeded a counts of 25 landings on a human per minute. Afterward, nearly all areas tested had fallen into single-digit counts, according to research published the next year in "Wing Beats" by the American Mosquito Control Association.
In the past, the state grants to counties for mosquito control topped $1 million annually, said Walker Rayburn, who until a few years ago headed mosquito monitoring for a seven-county health program in the northeast corner of the state. The state was almost always reimbursed by FEMA for spraying, he said, but on the one occasion he can remember that it wasn't, the money was taken out of the grants.
The grant fund has been cut several times, though, and is now down to $160,000, said Terry Pierce, the state director of environmental health.
So far, 10 to 12 counties have asked state emergency management officials about possible reimbursement from FEMA, and at least three have either done the expensive aerial spraying or plan to.
But even those in the best financial position are loathe to do as much aerial spraying as they would like, because of the fear they won't get the money back.
Dare County has sprayed by air twice, at a cost of $200,000, and hopes to be reimbursed for that and its truck spraying effort, said County Manager Bobby Outten. The county would probably do more, but doesn't want the risk.
"If we had to, we could afford to eat $200,000 or $300,000," Outten said. "But not $600,000 or $700,000."
Some say their efforts to kill the mosquitoes were slowed because they didn't have the help of the state team. Currituck County did one round of spraying Monday and Tuesday, and would have acted sooner, said County Manager Dan Scanlon, but it took awhile to contract for the pre-spraying mosquito counts that the state team would once have handled.
Also, he said, FEMA officials were slow to respond to the county's request for help, and told county officials several times that they were swamped with all the requests for assistance from the counties.
Joe Conlon, a medical entomologist with the American Mosquito Control Association, said the state mosquito surveillance team had played a host of important roles. It helped local governments develop cost-effective methods for controlling their varieties of mosquitoes, maintained the complex maps for aerial spraying in case of storms - including dealing with the state and federal agencies that had a say in where spraying should be done - and played a crucial role in fighting potentially fatal diseases such as West Nile. Cutting the team from the budget saved $390,000 a year.
"It was very unfortunate and short-sighted to eliminate them," he said. "I understand the need for money, but mosquito problems aren't going to go away, and without the proper infrastructure for a proactive approach to controlling those problems, North Carolina will be playing catchup forever."
