Thursday, October 9, 2014

Invasion By 6,000 Brown Recluse Spiders Run Family Out Of Half Million Dollar Home

Covering the infested home

"Susan Trost testified she was walking through her new home, exploring it on her first day there, when she noticed a large, stringy web wrapped around one of the light fixtures.

It hadn’t been there on the walk-through date.

Neither had the webs in the bar area in the basement. In the kitchen, she tugged on a piece of loose wallpaper, and a spider skittered behind it.

She thought the home probably just needed a thorough cleaning, so she got to work.

In the following days, she saw spiders and their webs every day. They were in the mini blinds, the air registers, the pantry ceiling, the fireplace. Their exoskeletons were falling from the can lights. Once when she was showering, she dodged a spider as it fell from the ceiling and washed down the drain.
A month after living in the home, her 4-year-old son screamed frantically from the basement, and Trost saw a spider, about the size of a half dollar, inches from his foot.

Instead of smashing it, Trost trapped it in a plastic bag and looked it up on the Internet. It was a brown recluse.

Trost testified she contacted a pest control company that came in on a weekly basis, spraying the interior and exterior and setting down sticky traps.

Since brown recluse spiders often live behind walls, she hired someone to come in and remove drywall so the exterminator could spray behind it.

She hired another company to remove the insulation from the attic and put down a pesticide powder.
“After the attic treatment, it seemed to help for quite a while, although we were still capturing them,” she testifiedd. “It just was a decline; they weren’t gone.”

 At a jury trial in St. Charles County in October 2011, Jamel Sandidge, a biology professor at the University of Kansas, described the brown recluse problem at the Trost home as “immense,” between 4,500 and 6,000 spiders.

Most troubling was the fact, Sandidge testified, that those calculations were made in the wintertime, when the spiders are least active."

This is a story about how they got majorly screwed by State Farm Insurance as well. Go here for the rest of the story:  http://www.stltoday.com/news/local/crime-and-courts/extreme-case-of-brown-recluse-spiders-drives-owners-from-weldon/article_02e0dcb3-a772-5c47-84ce-ede4e21df346.html

3 comments:

Dr. Theda said...

Have not been bitten this year... they come in my house and crawl across the ceiling and drop down on a thin web...
Killed more than a few many times it was already crawling on me ... or coming for my hand on the "mouse" in my corner ... They have a very "nasty" Necrotic poison (causing rapid tissue decay)
... so, we are Always on guard...
they come inside around early Spring and again around this time of the year...

David said...

Yeah I remember some of your stories! I live well out of their habitat range now, thankfully. I got bit on the foot by one when I was a kid and actually got lucky. It only swelled up to about an inch in diameter then it shrank as the flesh and skin died. After about a month I ended up pulling off a black disk about 1/2 inch round and 1/4 inch deep, leaving a gaping hole.

Dr. Theda said...

Normally their bite leaves "scaring"