Fumigation in Los Gatos, CA

Local Context

Tight Almond Grove Lots and Steep Hillside Driveways Decide How a Los Gatos Tent Goes Up

Fumigation is a logistics job before it is a chemistry job, and Los Gatos makes the logistics interesting. The Town recognizes five historic districts, and four of them are residential: Almond Grove, University-Edelen, Fairview Plaza and Broadway. Almond Grove was the first and largest subdivision laid out after the Town incorporated in 1887, on narrow lots with houses set close to the property line and mature street trees over the sidewalk. Getting tarps over a two-story Queen Anne in that grid means planning the drop around those trees, the porch details and a neighboring roof that may sit a few feet away.

The hillside neighborhoods present the opposite problem. Homes in Surmont, Belwood, Rinconada Hills and the Kennedy Road hills sit on cut-and-fill pads with steep, narrow driveways and multi-level rooflines that step down the slope. A crew needs staging room for tarps and equipment, and on some of these lots the only flat ground is the driveway itself. We look hard at access before we schedule anything.

The reason tenting comes up so often here is the wood. Western drywood termites (Incisitermes minor) live entirely inside a member and spread by swarming into new pieces, so in a house standing since the 1890s the colonies are frequently in several places at once: a rafter, a header, a stud bay behind plaster and lath. Vikane reaches every void in the structure at the same time, which is exactly what a local treatment cannot do once activity is that distributed.