Don't forget to drain the pool

If your image of the typical home in foreclosure is of a boarded up house in a sketchy neighborhood, here's another picture to file away.

Officials in affluent Contra Costa County -- east of San Francisco and a Silicon Valley bedroom community -- are concerned about all the homes with swimming pools that are going into foreclosure. Abandoned pools are breeding grounds for mosquitoes, and now that West Nile virus has reached Northern California, the bugs are more than annoyance. Eight people came down with West Nile virus last year in Contra Costa County, and two of them died.

The Contra Costa County Mosquito & Vector Control District says there are nearly 10,000 homes at some stage of the foreclosure process, nearly half in areas at highest risk for West Nile. One in three swimming pools they get called out to inspect is infested with mosquito larvae.

Homeowners are either too busy dealing with their financial situation to maintain their properties, or the properties are abandoned, and "the swimming pool or spa is left to the mosquitoes where hundreds of thousands of them can be produced." The district is asking people to drain their pools if they can't maintain them.

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