Thursday, June 27, 2002 | 8:30 a.m.
One soft summer morning in Boulder City, Joanne Lamb poured herself a cup of coffee, added a little cream and sugar to sweeten the morning and padded outside to watch local birds and joggers.
Less-desirable local life was also stirring. A resounding "pak!" a few feet to the left heralded the presence of a large roach that had plummeted from the elevated porch to the rocky landscape below.
Across the valley Beth Lee Segal was dancing in her morning shower as she used the shower head as a water gun to shoot an uninvited guest back down the drain.
Those roaches, at least, kept their distance. As Pat Curry and her new husband John cozily slept in naked bliss, their recently adopted kitten dropped a special present onto the bed. It quickly scurried into the warm dark folds of the sheets, swiftly becoming an unwelcome addition to the marital bed.
It is cockroach season in the desert. Humans and cockroaches have been uneasy roommates since man first began to walk on two legs. In the cockroach wars, man has found a worthy opponent. It is very likely that roaches will be here long after the last Elvis has left the last building.
Cockroaches survive in almost every region of the globe and watched with nonchalance as dinosaurs first conquered, then disappeared from, the planet. The Horticulture and Home Pest News website states that cockroaches can withstand more than 130 times the amount of radiation than can be tolerated by humans.
In fact, the site notes, "The amount of radiation that they can withstand is equivalent to that of a thermonuclear explosion." At least the roaches will survive Yucca Mountain.
This has been a particularly invasive year for roaches, according to local experts.
"The reason that they are coming in a lot more often than normal is because of the drought," postulates Steve Randall, branch manager for Bulwark Pest Control. "They have to have water every day."
Outside, cockroaches prefer moist, dark locations such as rock borders and shaded irrigated sites. Inside, they like bathrooms and kitchens. Although there are about eight kinds of cockroaches in the Las Vegas Valley, the most bothersome are the Oriental and American. They primarily live outside, but have been swarming inside in higher numbers over the past couple of months through small cracks and crevices found in stucco homes.
Most homeowners initially fight back on their own.
Modern home remedies include everything from dumping baby powder into cracks and crevices, to planting catnip around the perimeter of the house to leaving out a beer-soaked rag then stomping on the infested cloth in the morning.
"You know there is an art to killing roaches," claims roach warrior Trevor A. McDonald, Ph.D. "They are nocturnal creatures. I thought I could outsmart them keeping the kitchen light on at night but that didn't work. To successfully kill a roach one must first determine the direction in which the roach is running, and then try to get ahead of it so that you can splatter it."
Hand-to-roach, and even foot-to-roach, combat is particularly appealing to many. One morning, Jenny Davis was standing in the kitchen drinking coffee at her friend's house when a honeydew melon started moving across the counter. Her friend swiped at the melon, causing it to fly off the counter and spew cockroaches. When one of the roaches hit the linoleum and started to scurry off, the unwilling hostess came down on it hard -- with her bare foot.
Another combatant, Katrina Woznicki, claims to have hit a roach dead-on several times with a big shoe as it skittered up a wall. When it still wouldn't die she grabbed it with a paper napkin and flushed it down the toilet.
As Woznicki watched water suck it down, "He actually fought the tide and started crawling out of the toilet! I grabbed a jug of bleach and started pouring it all over him and flushed him again and finally it was over. That critter must've been the Rambo of cockroaches."
Others have simply flipped roaches onto their backs. Once a roach gets upside down, its flat body and the relative position of its legs makes it almost impossible to right itself.
Other methods are equally innovative and outrageous. Gail Yednick scatters coffee grounds near infestations and has been known to leave dead roaches near entry points.
"If you entered a room filled with dead bodies, you might avoid the area, too," she reasons. Some scientific research supports the notion that the chemicals set off by decaying roaches may be a natural repellent. Some experts note, however, that cockroaches feast on dead comrades.
Others spray the creatures with hairspray, hoping to stiffen them or suffocate them. "It does leave a shiny spot on the wall," local cockroach warrior Holly Ocasio cautions.
Powders such as baby powder and baking soda are often scattered around baseboards and near cracks to block a roach's entrance. Frederick Clarkson discovered a nest of cockroaches behind his kitchen cabinet.
"I didn't have anything handy to address the problem, so I shook most of a can of Ajax behind the cabinet. It rained powder blue roaches for days," he laughs.
Talc and other powders are pooh-poohed by most roach control experts, but Joel R. Coats, professor of Entomology & Toxicology at Iowa State University who specializes in research on natural cockroach repellents, says there might be some merit to powders.
"Probably talc is unpleasant in the mouth parts and joints and may in fact dry them out. Diatomaceous earth (finely pulverized silica) is a good natural insecticide," he says. "It isn't real potent, but it works. Other powders may also tend to pull off the waxy coating so that their bodies cannot retain an adequate moisture level."
Coats' research on roach repellants has focused on catnip and fruit of the Osage orange. Settlers cut ripe oranges and placed them in cupboards as a natural repellent. Catnip tea has a long history in American folklore as an insect repellant.
Other natural insecticides that Coats says may have merit include mint oils, eucalyptus, pine oils, thyme oil and clove oil.
"At the higher doses," he says, "we can get pretty good use out of them if we spray directly on them."
Because there is an increasing concern with the use of pesticides, natural alternatives are becoming big business.
In Europe, Colgate-Palmolive has brought to market Ajax Expel, a floor cleaner that also contains a cockroach repellant. Biocontrol Network is a Web-based business that specializes in green pesticides and fertilizers.
Thebestcontrol.com site advises sealing cracks and adding screens to weep holes, sealing food in airtight containers, always wiping counters and never leaving out dirty dishes, using lights only when in the room, sealing garbage containers and composting daily to eliminate as much attractive garbage as possible.
Once roaches have infested the inside of the house, however, professionals have the best access to safe and effective products. Many professionals are also going green.
Bulwark uses a derivative of the chrysanthemum for its pesticides and has totally eliminated the baseboard spraying. Instead, they use a pesticide gel on the inside of roach "roads," including electrical outlets and plumbing pipes. The gel contains bait and a poison that roaches ingest then take back to the nest where young larva feed on dead carcasses, then also die. An outside "barrier" spray keeps the roaches from reinfesting.
Coats advises homeowners to use an integrated approach with several different control mechanisms.
"Use hard insecticide once," advises Coats to cautious homeowners. "The next three treatments use the repellant to reduce the frequency of hard insecticides. Use sticky traps to get the tiny ones; use baits if it appears to be more than an occasional intruder."
That way both roaches and pesticides are kept to a minimum.
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