36 



N. J. Mosquito Extermination Association 



I will simply try to give you a brief statement of what is re- 

 quested from each county of this symposium. As you probably- 

 know, the county has been at work since 1912. This was the seventh 

 season that they had been doing work in Union County. The ap- 

 propriation spent was about $25,000, the amount that has been 

 spent in that county each year since practically the beginning. The 

 work has progressed to a point where about two-thirds of the inland 

 drainage and about 90 per cent of the salt marsh work has been 

 completed. 



There are about three thousand swamps of various kinds in 

 Union County, and about two thousand have been drained up to 

 date. Maintenance is a considerable item of our budget each year. 

 It is now running in the neighborhood of $10,000 for the upland 

 work. 



The bulk of four thousand acres of salt marsh in the county has 

 been drained. But there is a continuing problem of taking care 

 of sewage pollution which is coming in. The discharge from the 

 EHzabeth sewers particularly, is growing greater and greater every 

 year, and the raw sewage which is dumped into the meadow has 

 no proper outlet for permanent disposal. It is simply poured out 

 at the edge of the meadow, the cracks are congested and very much 

 filled up with the sludge which is deposited, while the more liquid 

 portion goes out to the bay. 



To dredge out the channels and keep them free from sludge, the 

 cornmission has got at work a stnall orange peel bucket, mounted on 

 a scow. This has been in operation for three years. It is run by 

 kerosene, so we do not have to carry coal and get it out long dis- 

 tance over the meadow to the point where the dredge is operating. 



About 250,000 or 300,000 of the approximately 1,000,000 feet of 

 ditching that we have on the meadows has been cleaned and, I should 

 say, about a mile of new ditching twelve or thirteen feet wide and 

 approximately five or six feet deep has been dug with the dredge 

 during the past year. 



In the center of the county, entirely surrounded by thickly popu- 

 lated sections, we have a tract of about 300 acres of fresh water 

 swamp which gets more or less sewage pollution, that is a very bad 

 mosquito breeding area for a number of different types of inland 

 breeding mosquitoes. During the past year the commission began 

 the job of draining that. They drained only 35 acres of the 305 



