Killing Clean: Underground Hit: Jack Kimmich’s brand of rodent control makes that of Caddy Shack’s Carl (Bill Murray) seem comical. Raul Vasquez
Killing Clean
Busting gophers the green way.
Thursday, February 16, 2006
Some people think it’s so darn cute how gophers scramble across an open field and dive into their cozy little burrows.
Not Jack Kimmich. Gophers fear this man. They run, but they can’t hide—at least not in their burrows.
“Boom!” With a thunderous roar, a row of dirt and grass comes flying up waist-high on an empty field just north of Seaside. Kimmich, the gopher buster, has struck again.
For five years, Kimmich has rid customer’s fields from gophers without using pesticides or poisons. He uses a concoction of 98 percent oxygen and 2 percent propane gas to do his work, which he concludes quickly and efficiently.
When called to duty, Kimmich drives his truck (with gas tanks and hoses coming out of the back of it) onto a field. He hops out, approximates where the burrow might be, pokes a hole in the ground, fills it with the gas and ignites it.
The explosion is really loud, and sometimes you can see the fire coming out of the hole.
“The explosion kills them instantaneously,” says Kimmich, a middle-aged man with a friendly demeanor.
Kimmich started blowing up gopher burrows years ago on his own land, which is certified organic, after realizing that poisons and pesticides would do more harm than good. Then neighbors asked him if he would do the same for them.
The rest is history. Kimmich says killing gophers to prevent them from damaging fields and levies by his method is more humane than poisoning them. They die instantaneously, after all.
Kimmich’s business, appropriately enough, is called Gopher
Busters, Inc.
Gopher Busters can be reached at 320-8707.
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