Extreme case of brown recluse spiders drives owners from Weldon Spring home
By Susan Weich, St. Louis Post-Dispatch | |
McClatchy-Tribune Information Services |
The home was infested with between 4,500 and 6,000 brown recluse spiders, according to one estimate.
The previous homeowners abandoned the 2,400-square-foot atrium ranch after years of pesticide treatments couldn't curb the invasion.
The home went into foreclosure and hasn't sold, apparently because no one wanted to live with its history.
Blue-and-orange striped tarps covered the house this week as an exterminator blasted the spiders and eggs with 200 pounds of sulfuryl fluoride gas, pumped in at 67 degrees below zero.
The spider problem started in
It hadn't been there on the walk-through date.
Neither had the webs in the bar area in the basement. In the kitchen, she tugged on a piece of loose wallpaper, and a spider skittered behind it.
She thought the home probably just needed a thorough cleaning, so she got to work.
In the following days, she saw spiders and their webs every day. They were in the mini blinds, the air registers, the pantry ceiling, the fireplace. Their exoskeletons were falling from the can lights. Once when she was showering, she dodged a spider as it fell from the ceiling and washed down the drain.
A month after living in the home, her 4-year-old son screamed frantically from the basement, and Trost saw a spider, about the size of a half dollar, inches from his foot.
Instead of smashing it, Trost trapped it in a plastic bag and looked it up on the Internet. It was a brown recluse.
Trost testified she contacted a pest control company that came in on a weekly basis, spraying the interior and exterior and setting down sticky traps.
Since brown recluse spiders often live behind walls, she hired someone to come in and remove drywall so the exterminator could spray behind it.
She hired another company to remove the insulation from the attic and put down a pesticide powder.
"After the attic treatment, it seemed to help for quite a while, although we were still capturing them," she testifiedd. "It just was a decline; they weren't gone."
In 2008, the Trosts filed a claim with their insurance company,
At a jury trial in St. Charles County in
Most troubling was the fact, Sandidge testified, that those calculations were made in the wintertime, when the spiders are least active.
Jurors found in the Trosts' favor and awarded them
The Gaults had their defense provided by their insurers, also
The Trosts have since filed another lawsuit, this one against
The couple declined to be interviewed for the story.
Magee said State Farm claims the policy doesn't cover spiders. However, Magee said the exclusion is for insects, and courts in other states have held that spiders are not insects.
In addition,
After the trial, when the spiders got worse, and
Today the home at 84 Gillette Field Close is owned by the
A spokesman for
Deaths from black widow bites are extremely rare, and are even less likely from brown recluse bites.
But that doesn't stop people from being fearful.
"A lot of the fear is overdone," said
The spider must be pressed against a person to be able to pierce the skin and get any venom in, he said.
Since brown recluses like to hide in places where humans don't go frequently, like storage boxes kept in the basement, people can get bit if they put on clothes or shoes they've been storing.
"The best way to prevent getting bitten is to shake out your stuff and just frequent cleaning of the house," Ormsby said.
Dr.
Even if it did, Sengupta said the amount of venom injected is so small, people don't usually have any complications. Severe reactions are rare.
But they include nausea, vomiting, fever and. even rarer, anemia, a drop in red blood cell count and muscle breakdown that can spread to renal failure.
The other thing that people worry about is necrosis, or a breakdown of their skin around the bite. Sengupta said if this happens, a patient may have to see a plastic surgeon for wound debridement and treatment or a skin graft.
Ormsby said a lot of spiders are misidentified as brown recluses. The spider has a distinctive violin-shaped patch on the back of its head, where the legs are attached.
"
For the past two years, McCarthy has been using tenting and fumigating -- a method popularized in the South for eradicating termite infestations -- to handle brown recluses, beetles, bed bugs and other pesky problems.
The treatment costs between
"We create a very hostile environment temporarily inside the home to kill the desired target," said
Spiders are not good subjects to kill with pesticides, Richardson said, because of their body makeup.
"You almost have to contact them with it to get the best results because they do have collagen on the tips of their feet, and they don't absorb pesticides that you lay down."
This week, workers used nine tarps -- 15,000 square feet -- to cover the home at Whitmoor. They rolled edges of the tarps together and attached them with heavy duty clamps.
They filled the home with sulfuryl fluoride gas that permeated the walls to kill not only the spiders, but their eggs.
"There'll be nothing alive in there after this,"
The tent attracted the attention of neighbor
"But my experience is that most buildings or houses that are over 40 years old have brown recluses in them -- particularly upstairs if there's a second story or in the attic -- and new houses that are only 10 to 20 years old may not have them at all," he said.
Carrel said improved construction methods don't allow for many cracks and crevices for the brown recluses to hide in during the daytime.
Other than that, it's a mystery why the spiders inhabit some homes and not others. Picking a fairly new, upscale home as a place to reproduce is "just weird," he said.
"I don't know what to make of it," he said.
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