Tower Bugged At Palm Beach

First it was the pigeons, cooing and roosting and making a smelly mess of the tower at Palm Beach International Airport. But when the pigeons were banished, the tiny mites that feed on them got hungry, and discovered 38 warm-blooded controllers right downstairs. “When they’re crawling on you, and you can’t see them, it kind of gives you the heebie-jeebies,” controller Douglas Faucher told the Sun-Sentinel. “We don’t need the distraction when we’re trying to perform our duties.” The tiny mites, as wide as the period at the end of this sentence, are practically invisible, but they bite … and then there’s the pesticides. Noxious fumes from a pesticide mix used last week in an attempt to kill the mites brought complaints from woozy controllers and after 30 days of battling the plagues, the FAA has brought in a temporary tower to host the workers while the place gets thoroughly cleaned and aired out.