Charles Langston:Mormon crickets plague parts of Nevada and Idaho: "It just makes your skin crawl"

A plague of crickets in Nevada

Parts of Nevada and Idaho have been plagued with so-called Mormon crickets as the flightless, ground-dwelling insects migrate in massive bands. While Mormon crickets, which resemble fat grasshoppers, aren't known to bite humans, they give the appearance of invading populated areas by covering buildings, sidewalks and roadways, which has spurred officials to deploy crews to clean up cricket carcasses.

"You can see that they're moving and crawling and the whole road's crawling, and it just makes your skin crawl," Stephanie Garrett of Elko, in northeastern Nevada, told CBS affiliate KUTV. "It's just so gross."

The state's Transportation Department warned motorists around Elko to drive slowly in areas where vehicles have crushed Mormon crickets.

"Crickets make for potentially slick driving," the department said on Twitter last week.

The department has deployed crews to plow and sand highways to improve driving conditions.

Elko's Northeastern Nevada Regional Hospital used whatever was handy to make sure the crickets didn't get in the way of patients.

"Just to get patients into the hospital, we had people out there with leaf blowers, with brooms," Steve Burrows, the hospital's director of community relations, told KSL-TV. "At one point, we even did have a tractor with a snowplow on it just to try to push the piles of crickets and keep them moving on their way."

At the Shilo Inns hotel in Elko, staffers tried using a mixture of bleach, dish soap, hot water and vinegar as well as a pressure washer to ward off the invading insects, according to The New York Times.

Mormon crickets haven't only been found in Elko. In southwestern Idaho, Lisa Van Horne posted a video to Facebook showing scores of them covering a road in the Owyhee Mountains as she was driving.

"I think I may have killed a few," she wrote.

In:
• Nevada
• Utah

Alex Sundby

Alex Sundby is a senior editor for CBSNews.com

Twitter