Swarms of midge flies are taking over a Kerrville neighborhood and residents said they are trapped inside their homes.
Mark Walker shared videos of hundreds of insects covering the door, walls and roof of his home.
"I live with a roommate who is severely immunocompromised due to recovery from leukemia. He could get a fever. I can't take the risk that there are this many mosquitoes here," said Walker. "This isn't just my house. I can't imagine over the VFW where they're right on top of the pond how bad it must be. We have the little league ball field right here and they play at night and they have those big lights."
Walker lives right across from the city's re-use storage facility. The deputy city manager, E.A. Hoppe, said that facility supplies more than 255 million gallons of re-used water to irrigation customers. He said the facility helps save roughly 3 thousand households of potable water that is not being used for irrigation. Recently, there was a recent midge fly hatch in the pond.
"We immediately brought a professional biologist on site within 48 hours to assess the situation. What he found is that it's a healthy eco-system within that area. There was a midge fly hatch. We have taken proactive steps to implement biological measures to interrupt that midge fly life cycle," said Hoppe.
The city said it deployed two batches of a fish called gambusia affinis into the storage pond. It says they will eat both midge fly and mosquito larva.
"We also deployed an organic larvicide that the larva will actually eat and it interrupts the life cycle so they don't become adult midge flies," added Hoppe.
He said the biologist determined that there was no mosquito issue that was unusually high in the pond and residents should not be concerned about the midge fly.
"He wasn't able to assess the exact type of midge fly it was but our staff has noticed that these are a midge fly biting variety," he said. "The adult midge fly has a life span of 3 to 4 days and an overall life span of 3 weeks. We hope that our active measures will help interrupt that life cycle so we hope it will be short lived."
"I'll believe it when I see it. The swarms that I saw...We don't even dare open the door to let a dog in because the bugs just keep swarming in our house," said Walker.