Thursday, July 19

The fog that surrounds

Mosquito spraying is already under way in Loveland and starting tonight Fort Collins will begin getting its twice-weekly dose of neurotoxins to knock back the skeeters and their West Nile-carrying proboscises.

We've gotten a handful of people asking us when and where their cities will be spraying and how they can avoid the toxic fogging. Here's a map of Fort Collins' spray plans, including times:


More information about the city's program is available here, and people should know that spraying will continue past July 24, occurring on the same days of the week for several weeks. Locals can sign up for email notifications reminding them of which nights their neighborhoods will get fogged.

Here's a map of Loveland's plan of attack:


More information about Loveland's fogging plan is here, but the city's site isn't as comprehensive as Fort Collins'.

Larimer County also has its West Nile information, including its "extremely high risk" rating and the numbers of confirmed cases, available online here.

As far as opting out, everyone is S.O.L. except the three Fort Collins residents listed on the state Pesticide Sensitive Registry. At the FC council meeting on Tuesday, one citizen half-jokingly asked those registered folks if she could come hang out at their homes twice a week.

Despite concerns about the sickening effects of spraying on immune systems and endocrine development expressed by city residents -- and four different council members -- only councilman David Roy voted to halt the operations. The other three dissenters -- Lisa Poppaw, Ben Manvel and Kelly Ohlson -- all backed away from stopping the fog, saying the council needed to have a policy discussion before making the decision (Isn't that what council meetings are?). For more on this and the county push to spray pesticides in an attempt to avoid a West Nile epidemic, check out "Sting Operation," in this week's issue of the Chronicle.

County health officials say there's no reason for alarm, no reason to lock ourselves inside, no reason to cover vegetable gardens from the mist, laden with permethrin. However, the EPA-registered carcinogen has caused cancerous tumors in mice during lab studies and researchers at Duke University have linked it to Gulf War Syndrome.

1 comment:

Anonymous said...

I inadvertently rode my bike through the fog last night...Smells like oranges.