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Angela and Patrick Beyers have been running from the truth for years. It was back in 1993 that they discovered the first crumbling floorboard in their house in the Gentilly neighborhood of New Orleans. They found the second a short while later. “Of course we knew,” says Angela. “But we didn’t talk about it. We just kind of pretended it wasn’t happening.”

But two months ago the truth finally became impossible to ignore. A tiny mound of dried mud appeared on the bathroom ceiling; when Patrick scraped it aside and peered into the quarter-size hole underneath, he saw them–pale white termites, hundreds of them, scurrying through the dank darkness above. “I freaked out,” he says. “I grabbed a can of Raid and blasted it into the hole”–about as effective as using a water pistol on a herd of rampaging elephants.

Termites are a homeowner’s nightmare under the best of circumstances. But what Patrick saw in his bathroom ceiling that day were not just any termites. They were Formosan termites–the most voracious, aggressive and devious of over 2,000 termite species known to science. Formosan termites can chew their way through beams and plywood nine times as fast as their more laid-back cousins. Their colonies are huge, housing up to 10 million insects. They nest underground, in trees, in walls–just about anywhere there’s wood and water. And they’re on the move: long confined in the continental U.S. mostly to Louisiana and a handful of other coastal areas, Formosan termites are now happily chewing their way through real estate in 14 states, from Virginia to Hawaii, and causing property damage to the tune of about $1 billion a year.

No U.S. city has been harder hit than New Orleans. Virtually every building in every neighborhood has been struck; the French Quarter alone has one of the most concentrated infestations anywhere in the world. Damage in the metro area over the past decade has outstripped the havoc wreaked by hurricanes, tornadoes and floods combined. And it is here that the U.S. Department of Agriculture’s Agricultural Research Service is launching its first major counterattack against the hungry bugs.

It should have happened years ago. Formosan termites first arrived on the mainland U.S. just after World War II, experts believe, carried from Far Eastern ports in planks or packing crates by military cargo ships. For decades, nobody worried much about them, thanks largely to powerful pesticides that drove them away from houses. But the termites simply turned their attention to nearby trees, where they thrived largely unnoticed.

In the late 1980s, though, the EPA banned the so-called organochlorine pesticides as being too toxic. That left termite fighters with a badly weakened arsenal. Even then, Formosan termites might have been controlled with an all-out effort, but few experts understood how grave the problem really was. (One exception, according to a multipart series on the termite threat that appeared in the New Orleans Times-Picayune last week, was Louisiana State University entomologist Jeffery LaFage; tragically, he was killed in a robbery just as he was rallying support for a termite-treatment program in the French Quarter a decade ago.)

Unfazed by the weak insecticides now arrayed against them, termite populations boomed–in New Orleans, and also in the half a dozen other Southern port cities where they had become entrenched. And within the past year or two, their presence has become far too serious to ignore.

Just because officials are finally facing the problem, though, doesn’t mean they know how to deal with it. The New Orleans counterattack is more of a series of experimental forays than an all-out assault. In one test, the USDA will attempt to beat back the bugs in an entire 15-block section of the French Quarter by using a variety of techniques all at once. At the same time scientists will try to figure out which of the available poisons is the most effective by treating 15 New Orleans schools with different chemicals.

Those that simply kill termites outright probably aren’t good enough by themselves, says entomologist Ken Grace of the University of Hawaii. “If there’s an area where others are dying, they’ll wall it off and avoid it.” So termite fighters are looking instead at slow poisons. One of the most promising is hexaflumuron, an insect-growth regulator that interferes with the termites’ molting process. Bugs that have ingested the stuff don’t notice any effects at first, so they spread it throughout a colony without suspecting they’re under attack. Then, when it’s time to shed their external skeletons and form new ones–a process that happens every month or so–the new skeleton doesn’t form; instead, the old one wraps around the insect, and the termite dies.

But laying out and keeping track of hexaflumuron and other baited poisons is a time-consuming and costly process, and because the tactics are so new, no one knows for sure how effective they’ll be. “We tend to look for magic bullets,” says Grace. But controlling termites may require a combination of new techniques and old, including the traditional approach of applying powerful killers that can wipe out a building’s worth of bugs at once.

Ultimately, scientists expect to learn enough in New Orleans to stop the spread of termites all over the country–although eliminating them completely will probably prove impossible. But for the Beyers family, “ultimately” is too long to wait. They’ve signed up for an experimental program the pest-control company Terminix is running to test a new pesticide called chlorfenapyr. The chemical was applied last week; in a month, Terminix will be back to see how well it has worked. If the bugs are gone, friends and family will pitch in to help repair the damage–a skill Patrick’s father Virgil Beyers Sr. honed 20 years ago when Formosan termites nearly destroyed his house. With any luck, Kayla Beyers, 4, won’t have to do it all over again two decades from now.

–Reported by Jyl Benson/New Orleans and Anat Shiloach/Washington

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