BATON ROUGE, La. (BRPROUD) — East Baton Rouge has been seeing an increase of mosquitoes in the past week.
“Around Tuesday or Wednesday, we started getting a lot of calls and noticing a lot of mosquitoes in the parish,” said Director of East Baton Rouge Parish Mosquito Abatement and Rodent Control Michael Becker.
But why is this a problem right now? According to Becker, the reason we have been seeing a lot of mosquitoes is because of last year’s drought and a rainy January.
“We have a flood water mosquito that we’re dealing with right now, and they laid a bunch of eggs last year. And those eggs remain viable and they’re just waiting for, you know, water to flood. And then they hatch out,” Becker said.
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Becker said the issue is being solved through workers working overtime with mosquito trucks at night and also with a drone.
“We’ve been utilizing the drone to larvicide as well as adulticide,” Becker said.
Areas that have been affected, mostly are the southern and eastern parts of the parish, but now it’s slowly starting to affect everyone.
“It started in the southern and eastern part. Now it seems like they’re almost everywhere and are starting to migrate northward,” Becker said.
This week, the Mosquito Abatement and Rodent Control center has done about 1,000 service requests, said Becker. He said the call requests started coming in on high-demand about Tuesday or Wednesday of last week.
“We’re backed up right now, obviously, but you can always call us, and we’ve been performing, I’d tell you over 200 calls a day. We do different zones and we’re able to pretty much cover the entire parish within a week. So, if we haven’t sprayed the area, it’s coming,” Becker said.
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For people to stay safe, Becker suggests wearing long sleeves and to use mosquito spray repellant if you’re going outside.
If you’re wanting to make a call request for the abatement team to stop by and spray your home, call (225) 356-3297.
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