Medfly Battle Comes Down to a Waiting Game : Agriculture: The aerial spraying has stopped, but it could be resumed if more of the fruit pests are found.

Now the waiting begins.

In the wake of 15 aerial sprayings of the pesticide malathion over eastern Camarillo and Somis, agricultural officials can do little more than wait and hope that the airborne assaults against the crop-destroying Mediterranean fruit fly have been effective.

The aerial program, which concluded shortly before 1 a.m. Wednesday, has been deemed a qualified success so far by agricultural officials. But now the program faces its ultimate test: getting through yet a third life cycle of the insect to prove that the tiny pest has, indeed, been eliminated from the county.

“I wouldn’t describe us as being anxious,” said Jim Rudig, manager of the state and federal Cooperative Medfly Project. “But I will say that we all will be very relieved once we get through that third life cycle.”

Should any additional fertile Medflies be trapped during or after the cycle, additional eradication measures are possible, Rudig said. That would include resuming aerial sprayings, depending on just what is found.

A Medfly’s life cycle lasts about six to eight weeks, depending on air temperature and weather.

The Ventura County Medfly infestation is believed to have caused more than $50 million in damage to area growers since the fall. It has been described by entomologists as particularly intensive because so many flies, 66, have been found in a small area around the orchards of St. John’s Seminary in eastern Camarillo.

Lemons and avocados are the most common fruit within the 86-square-mile Medfly quarantine area, but neither is considered a target of the insect, which seems to prefer laying its eggs inside Valencia oranges, peaches, apricots and other soft, sweet fruit.

“To say the Medfly is a nightmare to farmers is a heck of an understatement,” said W. Earl McPhail, Ventura County’s agricultural commissioner. “But I believe that we have been successful, and we’re glad to be done with the aerial spray program. However, we won’t know for sure that we’ve been successful until late July.”

Agriculture officials credited both an agriculturally oriented county and various industry-supported groups like the Ventura County Fruit Fly Action Cooperative Taskforce for helping prepare residents and political leaders for a possible infestation long before the first two flies were discovered last fall.

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Those officials say the aerial spray program’s only blemishes were caused by nature itself in the form of unseasonably cool temperatures and one unexpected rainstorm.

Cool air temperatures have the effect of lowering the Medfly’s metabolic rate, thus lengthening its life cycle. As a result, agriculture officials added two additional spray dates to the schedule to ensure that the eradication effort was completely effective.

The Medfly fight was also hampered on the night of April 7 when a surprise storm soaked the area with half an inch of rain, which washed away the freshly applied pesticide bait mixture. Officials completed a repeat spraying the following week, bringing the total number of treatments up to 15.

“The rain and the extended cool temperatures really did surprise us,” Rudig said. “We were hoping the air temperatures would start to warm and give us a hand, but they never really did. Otherwise, though, I’d have to say this has been a textbook operation.”

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Juan Mercogliano, a senior economic entomologist with the California Department of Food and Agriculture, rests a hand on the small fig tree at St. John’s Seminary, the epicenter of a biological “earthquake” that rocked Ventura County’s agricultural world.

Mercogliano, who refers to the site and the tree as “Ground Zero,” said it was there on Sept. 29 that workers made their fateful find of two egg-bearing female Medflies in a trap hanging from a branch.

Shortly after, as agricultural workers and officials frantically placed hundreds more of the fly traps in trees throughout the verdant seminary grounds and the surrounding area, it became clear that the area had become the site of an intense infestation.

Mercogliano points to a nearby stand of orange trees where he speculates that the actual infestation began.

“We can’t be for sure, but if I had to guess, those trees would be where the infestation got a foothold,” he said. “Medflies don’t like to fly great distances so that’s why we believe we found the first two in this fig tree.”

Nearby, a warning sign--”Danger . . . Do Not Harvest or Remove Fruit From Premises”--stands as the only clue of where the first skirmish in an all-out air and land battle to eradicate the tiny fly took place.

“I really wish it would say something like ‘Violators Risk Being Fined’ or something like that,” said Mercogliano, whose 10-person staff monitors and maintains the more than 2,500 Medfly traps arrayed across the county.

“The big concern we have is on those people who do not heed the quarantine restrictions. That’s how the insect is being moved, and it is how it could re-establish itself.”

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It’s about 8:45 p.m. on a Tuesday. It’s the second-to-last aerial spraying of the sticky mixture of poison and corn syrup bait over the 16-square-mile eradication zone in eastern Camarillo and Somis.

Jim Josephson’s pilots, dressed in green military flight suits, have begun their ritual of preflight preparations for the three big Bell UH-1 Hueys, formerly flown by the Australian air force. In a few minutes they will lumber into the sky.

Having flown these missions or sorties every two weeks since October, the pilots display no emotion as they go over a lengthy check list to make sure all the systems of the Vietnam-era choppers are in working order. The pilots are employed by Josephson’s San Joaquin Helicopters, based in Delano.

On board each of the red-and-white aircraft are both terrestrial- and satellite-based navigation systems--the latter of which, according to Josephson--makes flying the Camarillo eradication missions easier, safer and far more accurate than it would be without it.

The satellite system--known as the global positioning system, or GPS--allows the veteran pilots to know within the space of one meter exactly where they are at all times.

“I won’t say that we couldn’t fly this area without the GPS, but it would be much more difficult, and the spray swaths wouldn’t be nearly as accurate as they are,” Josephson said.

A little more than an hour into the mission, the three choppers return to Camarillo Airport for their first replenishments of fuel and of malathion bait mixture.

They form a single file in the air, and the first of them touches down in a pool of light between two tanker trucks--one carrying the fuel, the other the pesticide mixture.

Like an auto racing team swarming a car during a pit stop, workers pull heavy hoses from both trucks and scramble to meet the first Huey as its skids touch the Tarmac.

Then, its tanks filled, the lead chopper hops noisily into the air, and the next Huey in line repeats the process.

“We call it hot fueling,” Josephson said of the procedure. “We can get all three aircraft replenished this way in under 15 minutes. It’s much more efficient and we’re able to get back into the air faster.”

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But it is what Josephson and his pilots carry and eventually dispense from their helicopters that has Terri Gaishin worried so much.

Gaishin, chairwoman of the Group Against Spraying People, or GASP, has had an admittedly uphill fight trying to dissuade state and federal agricultural officials from spraying the pesticide over the 23,000 affected residents of eastern Camarillo and Somis.

Now about 700 members strong, Gaishin’s group started small with loosely organized protests at Camarillo Airport. At its height, the organization held a town meeting at Camarillo union hall in December that was attended by about 400 people.

Now, with the most visible and arguably the most intrusive portion of the program concluded, Gaishin says she will continue the battle by linking GASP with other organizations across the state opposed to aerial pesticide spraying.

“We are just beginning to fight this,” Gaishin said. “Just because they are finished spraying us doesn’t mean that we’re going to stop. This is a serious health concern that all residents of this state need to be made aware of.”

Gaishin and her group cited multiple studies conducted by entomologists and other scientists who believe that malathion, an organophosphate-based pesticide, may pose a risk to public health--especially to the young, the aged and the infirm.

State officials, however, have repeatedly stated their belief--based on yet other studies--that the pesticide is safe in the low doses used in spraying.

But Gaishin says the state cannot back up its claims. And she adds that the officials have ignored alternative methods of battling the Medfly, like low-intensity ground spraying combined with the release of other insects that are harmless to people and crops but that naturally prey on Medflies.

“I’m angry because they continue to tell people the program is safe when there is growing evidence to the contrary,” Gaishin said. “The petrochemical and agriculture industries are powerful forces in this state. It’s hard to battle their public relations onslaught.”

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In addition to the controversy generated by the aerial treatments, the cost to battle the tiny, colorful fly was not inexpensive.

At $90,000 a mission, the 15 aerial treatments will cost the state and federal governments an estimated $1.35 million. A total of 13,756 gallons of the bait mixture was dropped, of which 1,375 gallons was malathion.

But that figure pales in comparison to the estimated $50 million lost to date because of the infestation and resulting quarantine restrictions, according to McPhail, the county agricultural commissioner.

The infestation has also hurt farmers within the quarantine zone--especially those who grow avocados, lemons and Valencia oranges. Mandatory ground-based pesticide sprayings and optional large-scale fumigation have added to the growers’ expenses.

In addition, certain produce was prevented from reaching its prime overseas markets.

Though state and federal authorities do not consider lemons to be host crops for Medflies, the Japanese government, for instance, does. Japan imports about one-third of the county’s prime lemon crop. The ban has forced growers to scramble to find other markets, and these are places that don’t pay the premium prices offered by the Japanese.

Likewise, avocado growers with orchards inside the zone have had to fumigate their crops before agricultural officials would certify them for market.

At Mission Produce in Oxnard and at the Calavo grower cooperative in Santa Paula, officials say they have fumigated as much as 200,000 pounds of avocados a week.

“The relief at this point is in the fact that the residents out there will no longer have to deal with the sprayings,” said Bob Tobias, operations manager of Mission Produce. “Operationally, however, nothing really is going to change until they lift the quarantine, and, frankly, we hope that date gets here sooner than later.”

The Pleasant Valley School District has also shared in the cost of eradicating the insect from Ventura County.

Before each of the sprayings, school district officials and volunteers would carefully cover playground and gym equipment at eight schools, using nearly 100,000 square feet of plastic sheeting. Through eight sprayings, the district had incurred more than $13,000 in wage and supply expenses related to the sprayings, even though most of the sheeting was donated by area farmers.

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Where the next Medfly infestation will occur in California is a mystery that keeps many agriculture industry officials up at night.

“This insect is an extremely poor flier,” said Rex Laird, executive director of the Ventura County Farm Bureau. “But it’s an awesome hitchhiker, and that’s the worry.”

Officials agree that until visitors and residents alike start heeding the quarantine restrictions on importing or moving fruit, a Medfly infestation like the one that threatened Ventura County’s $840-million agriculture industry could occur anywhere.

“We are working to develop better technologies that will give us a chance to stop the importation of suspected fruit at major ports of entry in our state,” said Mike Chrisman, undersecretary of the California Department of Food and Agriculture. “But to really get a handle on this problem, we need the public to care and to get involved.”

And, as life begins to return to normal in the spray zone, state and local agriculture officials say the fight needs to be joined by the public if such ecological disasters are to be avoided.

“We are dealing with what amounts to biological pollution with the Medfly, and there may not ever be a magic bullet for this thing,” said John Connell, branch chief of pest detection emergency projects for the California Department of Food and Agriculture. “We need to get the public involved through a massive public education program. They need to know that a major infestation could threaten our supply of readily available, low-cost food.”

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Research continues into malathion alternatives, like a federal project that is examining the efficacy of a common red dye used in consumer products, and a network of more than 28,000 Medfly traps across the state is constantly monitored. Chrisman and McPhail both say, however, they would not change anything in the way they handled the Camarillo infestation.

“We didn’t have any alternative but to use the choppers,” McPhail said. “But I’m sensitive to the intrusion factor. In some cases it feels like they’re flying in your front door and out your back window. In my mind, we really can’t thank the 23,000 people who live out there enough for the patience they’ve shown.”

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Medfly Quarantine Area

Although spraying has ended,the Medfly quarantine remains in effect in Ventura County. Agriculture officials hope to lift the quarantine, which severely limits the way produce can be handled and marketed, by late July.

Source: State Department of Food and Agriculture