Martinez Unified School District Blowing Up Gophers

The Martinez Unified School District is blowing up gophers this year.

Gophers love to burrow underneath gardens, lawns and other grounds. Unfortunately, this is also true for playgrounds and playing fields, where the holes and divots the gophers create pose e a hazard for youngsters and athletes.

And gophers don’t leave just because you ask them to. Ask Bill Murray’s character in the movie “Caddyshack.”

The district, according to Mike Pawlowski, coordinator for Maintenance, Grounds and Custodial, has to kill the gophers. And it’s a three-year process, he explained.

“The first year of the cycle, we trap them and kill them,” he said. “But they’re very smart, so the second year we use poison. But they figure that out, too.”

So the third year, Pawlowski said, the district uses a device called a Rodenator.  It’s a mixture of oxygen and propane, pumped into the tunnels and ignited.

The sound, he said, is not unlike gunfire, so the district always warns the police department when they are about to use the device, to allay neighborhood fears about gunshots.

“On our sports fields, the tunneling creates holes and divots that kids twist their ankles in,” Pawlowski said. “It’s a safety issue for students and staff. Plus we rent our fields out to outside organizations. If we did nothing, the fields would be so full of holes and ruts they would basically be unusable. We try and be as humane as possible, but these are smart little critters.”

One advantage to the Rodenator, he said, was that it sends shockwaves through the tunnels, and that tends to scare off the gophers.

“The more we use it, the more they stay away from those areas,” he said.