Authorities Declare “War” On Bedbugs

From cutesy literary allusion to full-scale war in just one day:

An explosion of bedbugs, the apple seed-size insects that hide in mattresses and furniture during the day and feast on unsuspecting sleepers at night, have terrorized visitors, outraged residents and are now stirring political action.

“It was horrible. I never wanted to go to sleep,” said Caitlin Heller, 27, a Queens College student whose Jackson Heights apartment was overrun by the bloodthirsty bugs. “They were painful, itchy, and all I thought about.”

“Even now, after they’ve been exterminated, I think I feel phantom bugs,” said Heller, who has started a blog about the topic. “Even a piece of lint scares me.”

. . .

City Councilwoman Gale Brewer (D-Manhattan) supported a measure this week to ban the sale of used mattresses — perhaps the No.1 carrier of bedbugs. But at a hearing Monday, a city official testified against the bill, saying the ban might do little to control infestations and would adversely impact poor people.

Brewer said that even if the bill fails, the sale of secondhand mattresses should be regulated.

“We need to educate residents and city officials about this growing problem,” said Brewer. “Right now, the city’s doing nothing, and we need to declare war.”

Go ahead, freak yourself out: Beasts Feast On Blood While Authorities Dither; NYPD Bedbug; Don’t Let The . . .; It’s Endemic, Pandemic, This Epidemic; Bedbugs Don’t Wait For Midterms Now, Do They?; Don’t Let The Gasoline-Soaked Bedbugs Burst Into Flames In The Middle Of The Night, Setting Your Living Quarters On Fire.

Beasts Feast On Blood While Authorities Dither

“Feasting on human blood,” “confounding officials” — it’s almost out of Bulgakov’s The Master and Margarita. A city under siege by a host of unwanted mischief makers:

New York City is experiencing a dramatic resurgence in bedbugs — those pesky oval insects that hide in the crevices of furniture and feast on human blood at night — and officials are confounded about how best to respond.

. . .

At a City Council hearing yesterday on the issue, entomologists and exterminators said that bedbugs have been proliferating at levels not seen in decades. The cause of the resurgence is not certain, but experts have speculated that increased international travel, a recent ban on powerful pesticides and the market in used furniture have been factors.

A bill by Councilwoman Gale A. Brewer of Manhattan would ban the sale of reconditioned mattresses — old mattresses with a new fabric cover sewn onto them, often with the original upholstery and padding underneath — and create a task force to study the issue and make recommendations within a year.

Within a year . . . by then it will be too late — bwahahaha!

See also: NYPD Bedbug; Don’t Let The . . .; It’s Endemic, Pandemic, This Epidemic; Bedbugs Don’t Wait For Midterms Now, Do They?; Don’t Let The Gasoline-Soaked Bedbugs Burst Into Flames In The Middle Of The Night, Setting Your Living Quarters On Fire.

Just Because It Never Happens Doesn’t Mean That You Shouldn’t Be Scared That It Might

There’s got to be a local angle here somewhere . . . ah — there it is:

New York beachgoers have a better chance of seeing the Loch Ness monster than getting fatally stung by a stingray like the one that killed “Crocodile Hunter” Steve Irwin, experts said yesterday.

“The odds of that happening anywhere, let alone in New York, are next to impossible,” said Hans Walters, an animal expert at the New York Aquarium in Coney Island.

Cownose and roughtail stingrays typically scour the ocean floor several miles off the Atlantic coast, but they occasionally swim closer to the shore in search of food, Walters said.

Unlike a 350-pound roughtail at the aquarium, the stingrays most likely to make an appearance in the waters off Coney Island or the Rockaways usually weigh less than 10 pounds, he said.

Nonetheless, the best way to avoid being stung by a stingray’s venomous barbs is by shuffling your feet in the sandy water, which tends to scare off marine life.

“I’ve heard of people bitten by bluefish and pinched by crabs, but I’ve never once heard of anybody stepping on a stingray in New York,” Walters said.

. . .

Despite the unlikely odds of being attacked, however, not all Coney Island beachgoers were ready to jump back in the water.

“Hell, no!” said Queens resident Derrick Morales, 21, who was sunning himself yesterday. “That’s crazy. You don’t know what the hell is out there.”

Shit’s Fucked Up, Dude

The Daily News joins in the fear mongering, showing us how in the event of a strong hurricane, the entire Rockaway peninsula could be toast:

Disaster is brewing in the Rockaways.

More than 100,000 people live on an 11-mile spit of sand with just three routes to the mainland. A moderate hurricane would cover the peninsula with water — and a heavy one would obliterate everything.

But even as the city’s emergency planners are practicing how to evacuate the Rockaways to save lives, city housing officials are eagerly pushing plans to build almost 4,000 new homes there — right in the path of coastal storms.

“It’s insane,” said Queens College Prof. Nicholas Coch, a nationally recognized hurricane expert. “People who live in Rockaways are really playing roulette with Mother Nature.”

Hundreds of upscale homes, priced higher than $500,000, already have been built at Arverne by the Sea, an $800 million development on land that had lain fallow for decades.

Demand is strong and the city Housing Preservation and Development Department envisions thousands more homes rising nearby — thanks to the allure of New York’s last undeveloped beachfront property.

“People are only as smart as their collective memories,” said John Lepore, head of the local Chamber of Commerce. “There’s not been major, major storms for a while, and people have become affluent, and everybody wants to live near the water.”

New Yorkers generally don’t think of their city as vulnerable to the kind of deadly storms that hit New Orleans, Miami or Houston. But experts say the city has been thrashed before — and is coming due for another devastating storm.

“Why do we forget our own history?” Coch asked. “We have a major development in an area where history has shown that hurricanes have done tremendous damage.”

An 1893 hurricane destroyed homes and hotels along the south-facing coast of the Rockaways, and subsequent storms reshaped sandbars and inlets of the area. A 1938 hurricane that ravaged Long Island swamped stretches of the Rockaways.

Hurricane Ekaterina? Or, Katrina The Great Freaks Out Brighton Beach

The Russian-language press is stirring up fears of a catastrophic hurricane hitting Brighton Beach:

Russian immigrants in Brighton Beach are living in fear of a hurricane threat to which the rest of New York City seems largely oblivious. Speculation that a severe storm could soon descend on Brooklyn has been rife among immigrant senior citizens, many of whom are reportedly stocking up on water and medicine in preparation for an emergency that is much less likely to happen than some of the local Russian press and broadcast outlets have reported.

. . .

“I know one businessman who closed his business,” the editor in chief of a local paper, Russkii Bazaar, Natalia Shapiro, said. “He went back to live in Russia until the hurricane season is over.”

Employees at Pharmacy Express on Brighton Beach Avenue said that in May, senior citizens started coming in saying they were worried about a hurricane. “People read the Russian-language newspapers, and they believe every word,” a pharmacist, Tatiana Shmaian, said. Ms. Shmaian said her daughter lives in Moscow and called her to make sure she was okay after hearing about a potential hurricane on Russian television.

“They’re hearing there’s going to be a hurricane in 24 hours,” Pat Singer of the Brighton Neighborhood Association said. Ms. Singer said senior citizens have come into her office and asked what they should do if the city declares a weather-related evacuation. “They’re old, they can’t run, and they’re scared,” she said. “Katrina scared a lot of people.”

Ms. Singer, who cannot read Russian, blamed the local Russian newspapers for the speculation, saying editors are trying to scare their readers in order to boost sales. “It’s a ghetto, a Russian ghetto neighborhood. They read their own newsletters, watch their own television stations,” she said.

The scare appears to have started in March, when several Russian-language newspapers in America published a re port that said: “In the coming summer, a powerful hurricane could descend on New York with a force no less forgiving than Katrina, which emptied New Orleans last year.” That warning also was picked up by news sources in Russia. Then, at the end of last month, the New York Russian paper V Novom Svete ran a cover story citing a French scientist who said a tsunami would rip through Manhattan on May 25.

Then again, the prospect of a hurricane hitting New York does seem pretty frightening . . .