On a dazzlingly clear day last week under the high-noon sun, Bob Franklin and Dennis Vied taxied their Cessna Turbo 206 down the runway at Livermore Municipal Airport, east of Oakland, Calif., and took to the sky in search of a public-health menace.
They were hunting for mosquitoes -- or more specifically, fetid swimming pools that harbor the insects and potentially the West Nile virus they can carry.
As the foreclosure crisis has escalated, so has the number of abandoned pools. A million mosquitoes can breed in a single stagnant pool. Now finding and fixing them has taken on a new level of urgency.
Franklin's company, Aerial Services of Livermore, is a frontline warrior in locating the backyard breeding sites. Last year, mosquito districts hired it to fly over almost every county in California. It covered 3,500 square miles -- about one-third of the state's urban area -- and "harvested" 27,000 algae-ridden pools, providing the districts with photographs, maps, street addresses, latitude/longitude and parcel data, including ownership.
"We find lots of mosquito sources at foreclosed homes," said John Rusmisel, district manager for the Alameda County, Calif. Mosquito Abatement District. "It's an ongoing and big problem."
He hired Aerial Surveys to do surveillance over 75 square miles in a region east of Oakland last week at a cost of $8,000 to $10,000. "Google Earth is great, but if you want to know real-time, an airplane is best," Rusmisel said.
Once problem pools are identified, the mosquito districts can swoop in on the ground, armed with mosquito fish or chemicals to zap the insects. "Obviously, with a foreclosed home, there is no one there," Rusmisel said. "We can go right in; we have authorization from the health and safety code to do an inspection and treatment."
Foreclosures and the economic downturn have ramped up the mosquito districts' work. In Contra Costa County, Calif., for instance, of 25,000 homes that were in the foreclosure process in 2008, more than 2,000 had swimming pools, according to the Contra Costa Mosquito & Vector Control District.
Even occupied properties can have algae-ridden pools, something that's happening more as unemployment rises.
"People who are financially stressed can't pay the pool guy or purchase expensive chemicals," Franklin said.
Franklin, 60, launched his business almost by accident.
An electronic engineer who loves to fly, he bought an aerial advertising company in 2002 as a fun way to indulge his hobby. Around the same time, he had a pesky mosquito problem at home: His next-door neighbor's neglected pool was infested.
One day he was flying low across Sunnyvale, towing a banner advertising Circuit City, when he counted 50 polluted pools in the course of a few minutes.
"You can just look at them and tell," he said. "They look green, very turbid with lots of algae; sometimes they're brown or brownish green."
That caused a light bulb to go on. He contacted mosquito abatement districts for Alameda, Santa Clara and San Mateo counties and asked if they would hire him to locate the fouled pools. They agreed.
(Distributed by Scripps Howard News Service, www.scrippsnews.com.)
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