Last month, an environmental supervisor at Palm Beach County mosquito control told New Times that Miami-Dade County’s 5 a.m. spraying missions for Zika mosquitoes were simply “psychological,” wouldn’t actually kill Aedes aegypti bugs, and may have just been for show. And when the Zika virus hit Miami Beach, the U.S. Centers for Disease…
Miami Beach Commissioner Michael Grieco is sick of finding cigarette butts in the sand. As he strolls South Beach’s white beaches, he regularly has to stop what he’s doing to pick them up and throw them away. In fact, he once hosted a beach clean-up that netted over seven pounds…
Almost the minute the Zika virus hit Wynwood at the end of July, Miami-Dade County Mosquito Control scrambled low-flying planes into the sky. Trails of pesticides — one of them highly controversial and possibly harmful to humans — billowed from their wings on early weekday mornings, under the assumption that…
Almost 11 years later, Wilma is still Miami’s last brush with hurricane destruction. Earlier this week, a tropical wave in the Caribbean briefly looked like it might break that amazing streak. But now, forecasters say Florida’s chances of a significant hit this weekend are nearly gone. The system, which never…
With even more locally transmitted Zika cases announced this week in Wynwood and Miami Beach, officials are squabbling about who’s to blame and what we can do to end the outbreak. Miami Beach Mayor Philip Levine accused Gov. Rick Scott of “blindsiding” him with news that Zika was on the…
It can be hard for non-pregnant Miamians to gauge how much they should really worry about Zika. On one hand, a new University of Florida study predicts South Florida’s outbreak should top out at 400 locally transmitted cases and end by the winter. But another new study paints an more…
Earlier this month, a Miami-Dade County mosquito control plane buzzed over New Times’ Wynwood office building at around 11:15 a.m., wafting the organic, larva-killing bacterial pesticide Bti over the neighborhood. A nearby worker noticed a reporter taking photos and chimed in. “If you’re under the cloud, it gets on your skin,”…
When installing a bat house, which is just like a bird house except with a slit-shaped hole for the tiny flying mammals, it’s important to keep the box out of direct sunlight. Bats are notoriously temperamental, and if the lighting isn’t quite right, the home could get too hot or…
Come October, it will be exactly 11 years since Hurricane Wilma tore across South Florida. Astoundingly, no hurricane has made landfall in the state since. That’s a statistical quirk that has to end soon. In fact, it might just end early next week. A tropical wave just east of the…
Mosquito repellent isn’t trendy, plus it’s sticky and smells like floor cleaner. So for Miami adults who aren’t worried about pregnancy, it’s been pretty easy to rationalize leaving the house unprotected amidst the Zika outbreak since the virus allegedly is only harmful to growing fetuses. Bad news: A study released…
Just 14 hours after Miami Beach Mayor Philip Levine stood in front of reporters and said there was “no Zika outbreak in Miami Beach,” Gov. Rick Scott announced in a press conference today that five locally transmitted Zika cases had been identified in the city’s highest-traffic tourist area. The Centers…
The Zika virus has been transmitted locally to two people in Miami Beach, Commissioner Kristen Rosen Gonzalez told New Times via phone today. The Florida Department of Health had previously assumed active transmissions were just confined to a small area surrounding Wynwood. Reading from a memo sent by City Manager Jimmy…
Last month, Florida’s Environmental Regulation Commission took the alarming step of changing state rules to allow more cancer-causing chemicals in Florida’s water. That change is currently on hold thanks to the Seminole Tribe of Florida, which sued the state over the change — and they’re far from alone at being alarmed at…
As a kid, Valencia Gunder was terrified of the pool. But one day when she was around seven years old, an uncle who was a lifeguard threw her right in. He told her not to be afraid, that everything would be fine if she could swim. And that’s how she…
Judd Allison, the owner of 305 Films and the Wynwood event space Toejam Backlot, was already upset about Gov. Rick Scott’s handling of Miami’s Zika outbreak. And then he read about Miami-Dade County Mosquito Control experts spraying naled, a controversial pesticide linked to disorders in fetuses. During a meeting between Wynwood…
Remember in high school when you were supposed to finish Great Expectations for class the next morning but you left it until the last minute and were finally just like, ‘nah’? You could think of more interesting things to do, so you did what scores of sophomores had done before…
When the Centers for Disease Control tried to spray Naled, a controversial pesticide used to kill mosquitoes, over Puerto Rico to stamp out the Zika virus last month, the island’s residents erupted. The city’s streets filled with protesters, and Puerto Rican Governor Alejandro García Padilla forced the CDC to send back…
Humans found the first instance of the Zika virus in Uganda’s Zika Forest in 1947. But, notably, the original Zika carrier wasn’t a person — it was a rhesus monkey. Since then, scientists have found the virus in all sorts of primates, including capuchin monkeys in Zika-affected towns in Brazil…
Zika panic is real, and it’s got Miami in its insect-like pincers. Your boss smells like DEET. Your friends have canceled their trips to come see you. And any pregnant people you know are, understandably, very worried. All this concern has sadly led to some folks spreading serious misinformation about…
As an American, you have a right to know if the food you’re eating or the mosquitoes biting you have been genetically modified. As a Floridian, you also apparently have the right to ignore the opinions of thousands of scientists and scream your dang head off whenever anyone confronts you…
After going door-to-door testing people, spraying the entire neighborhood by air, and demanding as many people as possible drain and cover and sources of standing water in their homes, the Florida Health Department announced today that a 10-block area of northwest Wynwood — a small portion of the “active transmission…
Wynwood’s transformation from scrappy artist haven to full-on tourist attraction has been swift. And one of the surest signs of the switch came when the big, open-air tour buses began stopping outside Wynwood Walls, disgorging hordes of camera-toting visitors to wander the murals. Zika, though, is threatening to bring that…
