Village sprayed DDT in Riley Creek for over 20 years

By Fred Steiner
www.BlufftonForever.com

If this doesn’t frighten you, nothing will. The Village of Bluffton (and probably many, many other municipalities), used DDT for over 20 years to kill mosquitoes. Here’s the account from the May 28, 1953, Bluffton News.

Bluffton’s annual war on mosquitoes was launched this week under the direction of Mayor Wilbur A. Howe, as work got underway on a control program, which has proved extremely successful over the last two decades.

Frequent rainfall, which has kept streams moving, preventing the accumulation of pools of stagnant water, has made control spraying unnecessary until this week, the mayor said.

During the normal summer of treatment of Bluffton’s streams, parts of quarries, the village dump, etc., the control required about 50 gallons of DDT and approximately 1,000 gallons of oil.

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