Mosquito Extermination in Nassau County 



W. H. DeMott 



Chief Inspector, Nassiaiu County Mosquito Extermination Commis- 

 sion, Freeport, N. Y. 



Papers read before this body in 191 7 by C. C. Adams, and in 1918 

 by William V. Becker, have informed you of the organization of 

 anti-mosquito work in Nassau County and chronicled the progress 

 of the salt-marsh work. So I shall devote the major part of my 

 paper to the history of our upland or anti-malaria work. 



First, however, so you will understand that we are not neglecting 

 our salt marsh, I want to outline very briefly what is being done 

 along that line. Our 1919 contract for 450,583 feet gives us a total 

 of nearly 5,000,000 feet of ditches installed on our salt marshlands 

 from Inwood to Wantagh. Another contract for approximately 

 300,000 feet will be let in 1920 to ditch the meadows from Wantagh 

 to Seaford. 



Our 1919 maintenance plan is, I think, worthy of mention. We 

 employed no large maintenance crew for a few weeks in the spring. 

 Instead, we divided our ditched areas into four sections and put 

 each section in charge of an inspector and labor crew of four men. 

 These men kept up a constant patrol the entire season, doing both 

 cleaning and minor extension work. During the season 4,198,505 

 feet of ditches were covered approximately five times. The seasonal 

 cost of the work was $6,849.00, or $0.0004 per foot. A total of 

 36,620 feet of spur ditches were installed at a cost of $0.0285 per 

 foot. Since the county has been practically free from sollicitans 

 mosquitoes as far east as Merrick, this thorough maintenance has 

 amply justified itself. 



You might also be interested to know how we secured and kept 

 our salt-marsh laborers at the comparatively low rate of $3.50 a 

 day, when all around us there was an unprecedented demand for 

 unskilled labor at an average rate of $5.00 a day. We put our men 

 on a weekly basis and paid them $21.00. No deductions were made 

 for rainy days or holidays. A dependable weekly pay envelope, 

 which did not fluctuate with the weather, appealed to the men and 

 had many advantages from our point of view, as well, since it kept 

 our labor cost down and stabilized our daily work accomplished, for 



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