Dirty Jobs Recap: Mosquito Control Officer
House Gutter. The first job Mike takes in this episode is that of a house gutter, and that is exactly what he does. In New Orleans, there are still houses that are virtually untouched over a year after Hurricane Katrina came through, and these houses need to be stripped bare before the rebuilding can even begin. That's where this job comes in. Teams of people who used to work in all sorts of jobs now go into these houses and rip out everything, tearing the house down to bare studs, and then they clean the studs.
In the process, they encounter some of the nastiest stuff imaginable. Walls are infected with mold, where the water has simply penetrated the drywall and the mold has grown uncontested for more than a year. There are bowls in cabinets that still hold Katrina Stew. Have you ever left a load of laundry in the wash for a day or two when you just couldn't get to it? Imagine a load that's been sitting for months. Then imagine the last blast of water came from rotten everything that dumped into the washer, and since washers are designed to keep water it's still just sitting there, waiting for you.
Over the course of a couple of days, these guys go into the house, and one room at a time, they rip out everything. They start with the big stuff, that is relatively easy to get out. Something like movers. Then they pull out the walls and the ceilings and the electrical too. It all comes out. They are intent on removing everything except for the wood. When that's done, they get a pressure washer, fill it with a concentrated soap, and they still get dirt off of the bare wood which they have to push out the door. Everything they took out gets piled up on the street for the city to come by and pick up. This is one dirty, nasty job.
Rodent Control Officer. Now imagine all of that and think about what just might like to live in all of this and you'll probably come up with rats. Big rats. Apparently there are tons of them, and that's where Mike heads next, to see if he can help catch a few. It turns out that the only ones he catches are the dead ones that have already been caught. But he does get to help set a couple of traps, so that perhaps the next time through he'll be able to catch some more.
Mosquito Control Officer. There's one other varmint that likes to call this type of place home, and that's the mosquito. These guys love their water, and New Orleans has lots of water already. Imagine all the abandoned pools that they now have to call home because there are no more of those pesky filters running. No more chlorine. The mosquito control board runs around town catching fish that eat mosquito larvae and they put the fish into pools to try to control the population. But that's only part of the problem.
There are also jars and tires and all sorts of other places all over the city that can harbor standing water, and it is virtually impossible to find all of those spots, so they also have a lab where they breed more of the little guys in an attempt to test various methods of killing them off again. Now this may be inhumane, but I'll leave that up to you to decide.

















