What Do We Need To Take Control? We Could Use The Rat Patrol!

Rat CompStat, a citywide rodent task force, the Rodent Control Academy and rat summits have all done little to stop the rat problem across the city:

In its aggressive strides to improve the quality of life, New York City has drastically curtailed its crime rate. It has overhauled its chaotic school system. But in one area, success is elusive: The city’s rats remain as bold and showy as ever, darting through well-lighted subway stations as blasé New Yorkers watch and scurrying through its public parks at will.

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Michael Mills and Eric Han, both sanitarians, are putting into practice a strategy of rat surveillance, known as indexing. Using maps and property information downloaded onto tablet computers, they look for six “active rat signs”: tracks, active runs (streak marks created when rats run along walls), fresh droppings, gnawing, visible holes and “live rats seen.” (The last is, mercifully, rare.) Each characteristic is recorded on a scale of zero to three.

On a recent walk through the Bedford Park neighborhood in the Bronx, the two men pointed out relics of private efforts, like abandoned bait stations and haphazardly applied patches of concrete. Some property owners even cordon off their yards with sheet metal in a usually futile effort to prevent rats from entering.

Why the rats remain is no mystery, given the abundance of waste New Yorkers leave behind. In an alley next to an apartment building were two exposed trash cans. Inside one was an empty can of Chef Boyardee spaghetti and meatballs, with a residue of sauce.

At another building, the workers found a series of freshly dug burrows at the base of some yew bushes in a concrete, elevated planter that ran along the front. The planter was littered with paper, a discarded soda cup and other trash. A white foam food container was perched at the top of one burrow, apparently dragged there by a rat.

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The surge in complaints keeps the exterminators busy. On a recent morning, two veteran exterminators, Larry J. Adams and Harold B. Pou, parked a city van in front of an apartment building in Brooklyn. The front yard of a building on Bushwick Avenue was perforated with rat burrows, indicating a severe infestation.

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Outside another apartment building, on Eastern Parkway in Crown Heights, Brooklyn, a rat carcass was in plain view. The yard was riddled with burrows, and a superintendent said the owners planned to pave it.

Mr. Pou marveled at the yard. “This is what I call a golf course: 18 holes,” he said. “We’ve been here many times, and we just can’t seem to beat them.”