1/2 Chrissy tries to spray the flies to death (photo: Noël van Hooft)
De Heimolen recreation park in Baarle-Nassau is struggling with a huge fly plague. It drives Chrissy Stoutenberg crazy, she spends all day with the fly swatter and fly spray. “I can sometimes kill thirty flies with one blow. You can’t sit outside. And there are also hundreds of flies inside.”
Chrissy and her husband live on the campsite for six months because their new house is still being built. But after a month, they are now fleeing the park. And they’re not the only ones.
According to Chrissy, the chalet is uninhabitable. “We kill a hundred flies in one minute here, which makes it really impossible to stay here. You can’t cook, you can’t barbecue, you can’t have a drink. Even the airfryer has flies. The situation is really unhealthy.”
“Fleeing, Skiing and Killing.”
Chrissy makes the holiday home fly-free a few times a day. Each room is sprayed with fly spray, after which she flees outside. “Now we have to wait fifteen minutes and then the floor will be full of dead flies.” And indeed, after a while, the floor looks like a kind of cemetery. “I first kill the flies that are still alive and then I have to air for fifteen minutes to get the poison out of the chalet.”
But just opening the window is not possible, because then hundreds of flies will be inside within a few minutes. And so Chrissy stands at the open window waving a fly swatter like crazy. “I try to keep them out. My daily activity is fleeing, venting and killing.”
“If it continues like this, we can close.”
The owner of the recreation park has no idea where the fly plague comes from and does not want to comment further on the story. “The more publicity we give about this, the more we lose,” says an emotional owner. “If it continues like this, we can close.”
“There are livestock farms in the area, that would be the cause. There is little the campsite owner can do about that, but they are not taking any measures for us either,” Chrissy says frustrated. She pays a thousand euros a month for the chalet. “Apparently it is an annual problem, but they refuse to install screens so that we can air normally, they really do nothing for us.”
“I’m dizzy and nauseous right now.”
And that is why Chrissy and her husband are forced to flee to another campsite. “We had to buy a new accommodation yesterday, renting was no longer possible anywhere. It costs us our savings, but then we can sleep again and relax during the day.”
More camping guests have left in the meantime because of the fly plague. “Tourists arrived next to us last week. They were supposed to stay for five days, but after one day they had already left. And next door are refugees, a family, but they couldn’t handle it anymore either.”
After a morning in the chalet, Chrissy doesn’t feel well. “I am dizzy and nauseous now. I’ve had to spray everything twice already. Time to pack up and leave.”
