Termites from Hell

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Angela and Patrick Beyers have been running from the truth for years. It was back in 1993 that they discovered the first crumbling floorboard in their house in the Gentilly neighborhood of New Orleans. They found the second a short while later. "Of course we knew," says Angela. "But we didn't talk about it. We just kind of pretended it wasn't happening."

But two months ago the truth finally became impossible to ignore. A tiny mound of dried mud appeared on the bathroom ceiling; when Patrick scraped it aside and peered into the quarter-size hole underneath, he saw them--pale white termites, hundreds of them, scurrying through the dank darkness above. "I freaked out," he says. "I grabbed a can of Raid and blasted it into the hole"--about as effective as using a water pistol on a herd of rampaging elephants.

Termites are a homeowner's nightmare under the best of circumstances. But what Patrick saw in his bathroom ceiling that day were not just any termites. They were Formosan termites--the most voracious, aggressive and devious of over 2,000 termite species known to science. Formosan termites can chew their way through beams and plywood nine times as fast as their more laid-back cousins. Their colonies are huge, housing up to 10 million insects. They nest underground, in trees, in walls--just about anywhere there's wood and water. And they're on the move: long confined in the continental U.S. mostly to Louisiana and a handful of other coastal areas, Formosan termites are now happily chewing their way through real estate in 14 states, from Virginia to Hawaii, and causing property damage to the tune of about $1 billion a year.

No U.S. city has been harder hit than New Orleans. Virtually every building in every neighborhood has been struck; the French Quarter alone has one of the most concentrated infestations anywhere in the world. Damage in the metro area over the past decade has outstripped the havoc wreaked by hurricanes, tornadoes and floods combined. And it is here that the U.S. Department of Agriculture's Agricultural Research Service is launching its first major counterattack against the hungry bugs.

It should have happened years ago. Formosan termites first arrived on the mainland U.S. just after World War II, experts believe, carried from Far Eastern ports in planks or packing crates by military cargo ships. For decades, nobody worried much about them, thanks largely to powerful pesticides that drove them away from houses. But the termites simply turned their attention to nearby trees, where they thrived largely unnoticed.

In the late 1980s, though, the EPA banned the so-called organochlorine pesticides as being too toxic. That left termite fighters with a badly weakened arsenal. Even then, Formosan termites might have been controlled with an all-out effort, but few experts understood how grave the problem really was. (One exception, according to a multipart series on the termite threat that appeared in the New Orleans Times-Picayune last week, was Louisiana State University entomologist Jeffery LaFage; tragically, he was killed in a robbery just as he was rallying support for a termite-treatment program in the French Quarter a decade ago.)