The recent use of pesticides at Malibu High School to address an overpopulation of ground squirrels and gophers has ignited a growing community debate over the use of the poison in Malibu.
By Knowles Adkisson / The Malibu Times
Local residents are objecting to the use of pesticides at Malibu High School to curb rodent overpopulation, saying it could be harmful to other animals. But school district and county officials say the pesticides are the most practical and safest solution to prevent disease-carrying rodents from multiplying.
Signs were posted during the first week of August at Malibu High School warning that the pesticides fumitoxin and diphacionone would be present at the campus. Malibu High School Principal Mark Kelly said the Los Angeles County Public Health Department conducted a routine inspection of the campus in August and cited the school for having an excessive population of ground squirrels, and to a lesser extent gophers. The pest control company Stanley Pest Control of Van Nuys was then hired by the Santa Monica-Malibu Unified School District to reduce the rodent populations, and warning signs were posted on the school campus about the pesticide use in the first week of August.
Terance Venable, the school district’s buildings and grounds manager, said the pest control company distributed the pesticides in the hilly area by the softball and football fields at MHS. Two ounces total of fumitoxin were distributed in pellet form, while “bait stations” were placed along the fence line in the slope area containing five ounces each of diphacionone, a rodenticide.
Pest control services hired by school districts are required to follow the guidelines put forth in the Healthy Schools Act, a state law passed in 2001. The law mandates that signs must be posted 24 hours ahead of any planned distribution of pesticides, and they must remain for 72 hours after the pesticides have been distributed.
Ground squirrels are often a target of pest control because they can carry various diseases, including the plague. In July 2010, a ground squirrel in the Angeles National Forest tested positive for plague.
Venable said the district has been employing pest control services for years when schools have pest problems, and they traditionally work during the summer weekends.
Public Safety Commissioner wSusan Tellem, who first ignited the debate with an online blog post titled “Malibu High Gets a Big Dose of Poison,” in which she criticized the use of pesticides, said she opposed the use of the pesticides.
“I’m very concerned any time we put out pesticides,” Tellem told The Malibu Times Sunday in a telephone interview. “Obviously you want to protect the schoolchildren from any kind of problems, but we also have raptors that eat those small animals they’re trying to poison.”
Both Venable and City of Malibu Recreation Department Director Bob Stallings say the use of fumitoxin in pellet form does not cause death in other animals or humans. The pellets are placed in a hole, and the hole is then sealed off. The moisture in the hole then activates the poison in the pellets.
Stallings said the city tries to avoid the use of pesticides, but has employed them before in Legacy Park.
“There’s no residual poison in the dead animal,” Stallings said. “So if a gopher dies, inhales the stuff, gets out of the hole somehow and dies above ground, and the dog eats it, the dog’s not going to get sick because of the poison. It might get sick from eating the rodent, but they’re not going to get sick from the poison because there’s no residual poison in the rodent’s body.”
However, when state Sen. Fran Pavley was an assemblymember in 2005, she introduced a bill that would have authorized the county Board of Supervisors in individual counties to ban the sale of poisons containing anticoagulants after it was found local mountain lions were being killed by eating rodents that consumed poisoned bait. Fumotoxin contains an anticoagulant.
Dr. Cyrus Rangan, director of the Bureau of Toxicology and Environmental Assessment at the Los Angeles County Department of Public Health, defended the use of fumitoxin and other pesticides as the most practical solution.
“We can’t look at something like this and say ‘oh, there should be something safer we can use,’” Rangan said. “This is probably the best way to do it because it’s the most efficient way of killing the pest and we don’t have to use it for very long.”