Termite Control in Seaside, CA

Local Context

Fort Ord-Era Framing Has Had Sixty Fogged-In Winters Without a Hard Freeze

Seaside's housing boom was military. Tract after tract went up from the 1940s through the 1960s to house Fort Ord families, and most of that stock is still standing on its original framing. That framing was cut from softwood and covered in stucco or lap siding, and six decades later the paint film that once sealed it has checked at the eaves, the fascia, and the garage rafter tails. Western drywood termites (Incisitermes minor) need nothing more than that. They live entirely inside the wood, take no moisture from the soil, and leave nothing outside but a scatter of six-sided pellets on a windowsill or a garage floor.

The marine layer sets the calendar. Seaside sits just inland of the shoreline, so summer afternoons climb into the low-to-mid 70s once the fog burns off and winter lows sit in the mid-40s. Nothing freezes. Colonies here do not shut down for a season the way inland ones do — they slow and keep chewing. That is why the damage we open up in Ord Terrace and Del Monte Heights is usually years old before anyone calls.

Subterranean termites (Reticulitermes spp.) turn up too, mostly in the raised-foundation homes with dirt crawl spaces on the older streets off Broadway Avenue and around Noche Buena. About 17 inches of rain falls here between November and April, the heaviest of it in midwinter, and a subarea that stays damp through that stretch gives a soil-based colony an easy mud-tube route up to the sill plate.