ROANOKE TIMES
Copyright (c) 1997, Roanoke Times
DATE: Sunday, April 6, 1997 TAG: 9704080036
SECTION: HOMES PAGE: D-1 EDITION: METRO
DATELINE: NEW ORLEANS
SOURCE: JANET McCONNAUGHEY/ASSOCIATED PRESS
From a few blocks away, it looks like fog hovering in a French Quarter street. Up close, it turns out to be a swarm of insects, Formosan termites flying away from home to start a new colony.
``The cloud just appears. When you go to the source, you find there's one building and they're just streaming out of that building - hundreds of thousands from one door frame,'' says Ed Bordes, head of mosquito and termite control in New Orleans.
The voracious, rapidly multiplying termites, which reached New Orleans during World War II, are now spreading across the South and parts of the West.
They are eating the heartwood out of the ancient live oaks that shade New Orleans' parks and avenues. They endanger historic French Quarter town houses and Garden District mansions.
They hollowed out the 2-by-4s in a public library, then started in on the books.
In Hawaii, they even ate the gaskets on high-pressure water lines.
And exterminators won't guarantee they can get rid of them.
``I call it the second Battle of New Orleans,'' Bordes says. ``We have to fight these guys here, have this as a center to study the methodology, and export it to states that don't have near the numbers we do.''
(Pest control companies in the Roanoke Valley said they have seen no evidence of Formosan termites in this area and aren't expecting to for many years, if ever.
(``I was told by a chemical supplier that I would be long dead and buried before they showed up here," Bill Nunnenkamp, general manager of Terminix in Roanoke, said. He described the Formosan as normal "termites on crack," pointing out that they can chew through copper pipe to get to wood.
(Danny McNutt, co-owner of Best Pest Control Inc. of Salem and Vinton, and Barry Knox, owner of Brown Exterminating Co. of Roanoke, both believe Western Virginia is safe for now even if the Formosan has moved into other areas of the state. They both said the Tidewater area may have the termites because of that area's humidity and mild winters.
(McNutt, who fought the Formosan termites in Florida before coming to the Roanoke Valley, said the climate in Western Virginia with its deep freezes is not conducive for the Formosan.
(Ron Stegall, general manager of Orkin of Roanoke, also said he has not had any reports of the Formosan termites in this area.)
Formosan termites are thought to have come to Hawaii in the 1860s, but it apparently took them an additional 80 years more to get to the mainland.
Since then, the invaders have far outstripped their native cousins. New Orleans loses about $300 million a year to termites, and Formosans are responsible for at least 75 percent to 80 percent of that damage.
Hawaii suffers about $100 million a year in damage from them, says Julian Yates, an extension specialist in urban entomology at the University of Hawaii.
Formosan termites are a problem in 11 states: Hawaii, all five Gulf Coast states, up the East Coast into Virginia, and inland into Tennessee. California has one infestation, but it is in a generally desert area, and authorities think it may now be contained.
But unless fought hard and fast, Formosan termites are likely to spread farther.
Oklahoma, Kentucky, Arizona, Arkansas, Missouri and New Mexico probably have Formosan termites or will have them in the near future, according to Bordes' office. Eventually, the experts predict the pests are likely to spread from Tacoma, Wash., to Boston, Mass.
Last year, six new infestations were found in Atlanta, Ga. All were traced to railroad ties brought there from a warehouse in South Carolina, says Gregg Henderson, an entomologist with the LSU Agricultural Center in Baton Rouge.
They probably stowed away to New Orleans in crates carrying PT boat engines back from the Pacific to the factories where Andrew Jackson Higgins built 20,094 landing craft and PT boats during World War II.
Bordes, the New Orleans official, estimates it will cost $10 million a year for the next 10 years to get them under control in that Louisiana city.
The newest weapon in the exterminator's arsenal was developed at the University of Florida. It uses traps baited with wood and set into the ground. When termites are found in a trap, the wood bait is replaced with poisoned wood.
The worker termites - the ones that eat the wood - feed the queen, the soldiers and the winged adults that fly out to start new colonies. So the poison is carried back to the colony and spread there.
A building can be ``tented'' and fumigated to kill all the above-ground insects. More commonly, above-ground nests are sprayed with termiticide foam. But unless there's a ``breakout'' spot where swarms have left the building, there's no way to find the nests without tearing out walls or ceilings.
Formosan termites were first identified on the mainland in the 1960s, but old-timers who worked in boat yards have told Bordes that PT engine crates were infested with termites.
Camp Leroy Johnson, where the University of New Orleans now stands, also was a shipping depot, he says.
Now, every block in the French Quarter is infested.
``They don't pay any attention to addresses. As far as they're concerned a whole block may be one building, for feeding purposes,'' says Ed Martin, an entomologist.
A quick check of 4,000 trees throughout the city found termites in the soil around one-tenth of them, Bordes says. In some areas, including St. Charles Avenue, where the branches shade two lanes of traffic and the streetcar line in the median, nearly one-in-three oaks is infested.
The termites like lots of different plants. In Hawaiian neighborhoods built on former pineapple and sugar plantations, Formosans have done significant damage in less than a year. Since it takes four or five years for a colony to grow large enough to do that sort of damage, the termites were already under the fields, Yates says.
Other cities also report horror stories.
In Charleston, S.C., Formosan termites ate a bank wall into a shell that crumbled when a guard leaned against it, dumping him onto the sidewalk, says Clemson University entomologist Mac Horton.
Horton, who teaches exterminators in a master termite program, says a few years ago an estimated one in 10 of Charleston's utility poles was infested. Many became so weak that what once had been a foot-wide log broke at the bump of a car being parked, and so light that they then just dangled from the power lines instead of falling.
There are a number of reasons Formosan termites are so formidable.
Rabbits are nothing compared to Formosan termites when it comes to multiplication. Every colony starts out with a pair of termites. When one colony was found, it numbered 60 million to 70 million. They seem to have more egg-layers than native subterranean termites, according to scientists at the University of Florida.
Formosans also are hungrier than native termites. A colony can hollow out a wall in three months. They chow down on living wood as well as dead wood. Their galleries, tunnels chewed out and then lined, can cover 6.5 acres, according to entomologists at the University of Florida's cooperative extension service. They don't need to get down to earth to drink.
And they fly. They're not alone in that - native subterranean termites swarm in March, just as the Formosans will swarm in May through June in Louisiana. In Hawaii they swarm year-round, with the biggest swarms in spring and fall.
But, while other species can be stopped by spreading poison around a building, these can fly into the attic, set up house, and get their water from the condensation around a pipe.
The University of Florida treatment, licensed to Dow-Elanco as Sentricon, is a powerful tool, ``but it's not the silver bullet,'' Yates says. ``We're not to the point where we can rid an entire area of the pests.''
Scientists say more research is needed on other ways to minimize the amount of poison put out, and on ways to find termites early, before they do their damage - possibly by finding the tiny amounts of chemicals they produce.
``Now detection is, what? An icepick or a screwdriver handle tapping on wood to see if it's hollow,'' Yates says.
``If you can detect that it's hollow, it's too late.''
LENGTH: Long : 151 lines ILLUSTRATION: PHOTO: ASSOCIATED PRESD. 1. The Formosan termites have jaws soby CNBpowerful they can eat through copper pipe. They're like normal
"termites on crack," according to one Roanoke Valley pest control
company official. 2. Formosan termites, about a quarter of an inch
long, at work in Charleston, S.C., in July 1996. The hungry bugs can
destroy a house six to 10 times faster than native Eastern termites.
color.