Medfly’s Return : But This Time Spraying to Eradicate the Pest Stirs No Controversy in Area That Led State Uproar in ’80

MOUNTAIN VIEW, Calif. —  None of the diners even looked up from their rigatoni and blackened thresher shark when the first choppers rumbled over the Columbus Street Restaurant and Bar. On their second pass, Philip Genz stopped on the sidewalk outside and looked up.

“Hope it works better this time,” said Genz with an ironic little smile. Then he continued his casual Friday night stroll toward a nearby gelato emporium, scarcely acknowledging the droplets of malathion-laced corn syrup falling around him.

If this were a Hollywood movie, some blurb writer might put it this way: “Theyyyy’re baaaack!” They are Medflies, the treacherous little bugs that turned up again last week in the same area where a tumultuous episode in the history of California politics and agriculture broke out in 1980 and raged for two years.

The flies were finally wiped out that time, but not before costing taxpayers $100 million and farmers another $100 million. Some residents had their yards sprayed from the air half a dozen times, and the uproar caused the political hopes of Gov. Edmund G. Brown Jr. to crash in a whir of rotor blades.

When the helicopters returned to spray Mountain View again Friday night, Brown was in a tuxedo at the opening night of the San Francisco Opera--where a protest by AIDS activists during the overture caused more controversy than the dousing of cars and gardens by malathion here, about 35 miles south.

Strong Resistance

Seven years ago the helicopters were greeted with gunshots and telephoned threats. Red Cross evacuation centers were set up, and there was public sobbing by residents afraid of what the chemical might do to their organic radishes and their dogs’ lungs. San Jose officials denied use of the city’s airport, forcing the choppers to fly from a Catholic cemetery kept dark for security reasons.

But on Friday there was nothing of the sort. Only about 10 people showed up at a special meeting of the Mountain View City Council on Friday morning to discuss the spraying, and the council took no steps to stop the night’s assault.

“We’re not as scared and fearful as when it first happened,” council member Bob Schatz said.

The council itself planned to be outside the spray area Friday night at a social meeting with the City Council of neighboring Los Altos. “I am going to move my other car out of the area too,” said Councilman Art Takahara.

By 9 p.m., when the two leased Huey helicopters rose from a corner of Moffett Field naval station and made their first pass over Mountain View, the only visible sign of concern was the plastic tarps thrown over cars to protect finishes from the gummy droplets.

North-South Pattern

The choppers flew a north-south pattern over this city and parts of Los Altos and Sunnyvale, tailed at times by three choppers carrying news crews from Bay Area TV stations.

The biggest upset from the spraying was probably at the Farm Fresh Produce stand on Grant Road. Federal agricultural agents Friday ordered that a season’s worth of tomatoes be stripped off vines behind the stand and that any not sold this weekend be destroyed. Owners Dave and Diane Schmitz said they would take “an incredible loss,” and customers jammed the stand Friday evening buying up produce.

Seven years before, the find of Mediterranean fruit flies in a San Jose tree turned into a running debacle for Gov. Brown. It was the first outbreak ever in California, and for a year Brown heeded the advice of environmentalists and a few scientists and withheld permission for aerial malathion spraying.

It was a risky gamble. Medflies--the most potentially damaging of all fruit flies--could ravage the state’s fruit and vegetable industry if the few flies that were found took hold. In 1980 and ’81 they kept spreading, despite ground spraying and the release of sterilized flies imported from Peru and elsewhere. State officials said some of the supposedly sterile flies had come through the radiation treatment with their reproductive abilities intact.

Brown was finally forced to allow aerial spraying in July, 1981, after federal officials threatened a quarantine of all California crops. The Medflies had made an ominous move out of the San Jose area toward the farms of the San Joaquin Valley.

Before it was over, aerial malathion spraying had to be extended into eight Bay Area counties, covering about 2 million homes. Roadblocks set up to guard against infested fruit being moved into the San Joaquin Valley stopped about 5 million cars and trucks. Brown’s support plummeted, and polls found that he was seen as a bumbler for his handling of the Medfly crisis. He was trounced by Pete Wilson when he ran for the U.S. Senate in 1982.

This time, state officials suggested, the lack of controversy is due to the more precise tactics used to quash infestations. Aerial spraying will only be needed once as part of a multipronged attack on the flies, thus people don’t object as much, they said.

“The helicopters fly low and they’re noisy,” said Gera Curry, spokeswoman for the state Department of Food and Agriculture. “The fact that people’s sleep was disrupted week after week was a big factor. We could have been dropping water and people would have objected.”

Fruit Trees Sprayed

On Wednesday ground crews walked through the center of Mountain View where the live flies were found and sprayed fruit trees. Then, 10 days from now, the state will begin releasing 30 million to 40 million sterile Medflies a week until the colony dies out from lack of reproduction.

This approach has been used successfully three times in Los Angeles since the 1980-82 outbreak in Northern California, Curry said. A fourth eradication effort is being carried out in Los Angeles.

Unlike the first devastating outbreak, the state has obtained a guaranteed source of sterile fruit flies through a lab it sponsors in Hawaii, where the Medflies are a recurring threat to agriculture.