Termite Control in Morgan Hill, CA

Local Context

Drip Line, Pasture and Lawn Keep Morgan Hill Soil Damp Through a Dry Summer

Nearly all of Morgan Hill's rain falls between December and March. The other eight months the ground would be bone dry if nobody watered it. Instead this is a city of irrigated horse pasture, vineyard drip line, and large landscaped lots, so the soil beside a lot of foundations stays wet in August. That is the condition western subterranean termites (Reticulitermes hesperus) need, and it is why swarms come off Morgan Hill foundations in spring rather than only in wet years.

The median Morgan Hill house was finished around 1990, which puts most of the city in slab-on-grade tracts built during the growth-paced decades that followed the 1977 residential development control ordinance. Slab does not stop subterranean termites. They come up through a shrinkage crack, an expansion joint, or a plumbing penetration, then build shelter tubes on the inside face of the stem wall where a homeowner never looks. On the streets off Tennant Avenue and East Dunne, where the sprinklers are aimed is usually the first thing we ask about.

North of downtown it is a different building. Madrone and the older blocks along Monterey Road carry pre-war framing over real crawl spaces, and the foothill houses in Jackson Oaks sit on cut-and-fill pads with under-floor areas that step down the slope. Those structures can also carry western drywood termites (Incisitermes minor), which live entirely inside the wood and never touch soil. Same city, two different insects, two different inspections.