Mosquito Control – East Hampton NY

Description

According to a local sources the WPA dug ditches in an effort to combat mosquitoes throughout marshland in northeast East Hampton, New York (Springs, NY) during the Great Depression.

“Accabonac, like nearly all salt marshes along the East Coast, has a series of grid-like ditches that are obviously manmade. Most of these ditches were hand-dug under the Works Projects Administration in the 1930s, under the pretense of dewatering the high marsh surface, thereby eliminating potential mosquito breeding habitat. [Unfortunately, the] project was largely ineffective in controlling mosquitoes and had several adverse ecological impacts on important marshland habitat.”