And By “Low-Hanging Fruit” We Mean Low-Hanging Fruit Stored At Unsafe Temperatures Too Close To Chemicals

Student journalists (and some professional ones) can’t resist the low-hanging fruit:

NYU students know BBQ, on the corner of University Place and Eighth Street, for its frozen margaritas and one of the best happy hours near campus. But the noisy watering hole is also popular with flying insects and roaches, according to a city health inspection report available online.

During an inspection BBQ failed on Oct. 17, a Department of Health and Mental Hygiene inspector noted “evidence of roaches or live roaches” and flying insects. The DOHMH also cited BBQ for several food temperature violations.

BBQ is one of at least six Washington Square-area restaurants that have failed one or more city health inspections this year, WSN reported yesterday. DOHMH keeps online records of its inspections, citing restaurants for violations including evidence of rodents and cockroaches and failing to keep food at safe temperatures. Violations are assigned point values that accumulate to form a restaurant’s score — zero is the best possible score and 28 points equals a failure of an inspection.

Of the restaurants with failed inspections, only Dojo East on St. Marks Place was closed; the other five restaurants passed subsequent inspections. Of those — BBQ, Campus Eatery, Dean & Deluca, Le Basket and Peanut Butter & Co. — BBQ had the highest score, according DOHMH reports. BBQ failed a follow-up inspection on Nov. 8, scoring 41 points. Inspectors again found evidence of flying insects and roaches, as well as several food temperature violations.

Seriously, though, the Washington Square News deserves many props for getting not one but two managers to serve up statements along the lines of “The bottom line is that we passed, and if we’re not good, we’d be closed.” Which is why you’ve got to feel for Dojo, which took care of one problem only to see another rearing its ugly head:

Dojo Restaurant on St. Marks Place has failed three of its past four inspections since September 2005 and earned over 60 points on its last two, according to inspection reports. In a Sept. 6 inspection, the inspector saw evidence of mice and flying insects. In a re-inspection only a few weeks later, an inspector found evidence of rats instead.

Then there’s the unsettling concept of the Incontinent Mouse (incidentally, a great name for a coffee shop):

And vermin infestations can do more than cause customers to shriek in horror.

“They carry all kinds of disease,” [Pest Away Exterminating owner Jeffrey] Eisenberg said. “Mice urinate every 15 seconds. They urinate literally thousands of times a day.

“If they’re on the countertop, if they’re on the food, they’ve urinated,” said Eisenberg. He explained that while customers might not understand it as “food poisoning,” they can feel the effects.

Don’t Dump In, On Or Upstream From The Bronx!

Don’t these towns have water treatment systems? Septic tanks? Of course, there’s little need for such technology when you can just dump shit into the Bronx River:

Four Westchester municipalities — Scarsdale, White Plains, Mount Vernon and Greenburgh — agreed to stop discharging sewage into the Bronx River by May 1, 2007, under a Nov. 28 agreement reached with the attorney general and the state Department of Environmental Conservation.

Discharging untreated sewage is already against state law, but the prohibition lacked teeth before Spitzer’s office began testing water samples along the river and identifying which towns were responsible for violations. The towns have agreed to improve their storm-water systems and will pay fines for future violations.

“This will help make the river safe and swimmable for those of us downstream,” said Dart Westphal, chairman of the Bronx River Alliance, which oversees the 8-mile stretch of the river from the Westchester County line to where it empties into the East River.

Well, don’t go overboard there . . .

Location Scout: Bronx River.

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.

. . .

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.

. . .

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.

. . .

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.”

Yet Another Reason To Skip School

As with the flu, bedbugs are using schools to jump from household to household:

As the city grapples with a resurgence of the pesky critters in hot-sheet motels and Park Avenue penthouses, it appears the tiny bloodsuckers are hitchhiking their way into classrooms on the coats of schoolchildren.

There have been 34 confirmed cases of bedbugs in 24 city schools since Oct. 1, according to the city Department of Education.

Whether the cases reflect a rise in bedbugs in schools is impossible to know because the department only began informally asking schools to record sightings this fall in response to a surge of infestations across the city.

A department spokeswoman insisted the pests were not running rampant.

“There have been absolutely no infestations,” said the spokeswoman, Marge Feinberg. “There are one or two [bugs] in each case.”

Although bedbugs are not considered a major health threat because they do not transmit disease, they can leave nasty, itchy welts and be expensive to exterminate.

“We were so scared that we would bring it home,” said a staffer who requested anonymity at PS 70 in Long Island City, one of several Queens schools to report bedbugs this fall. “It was all over the neighborhood, [so] the bodegas started carrying bedbug spray.”

According to the DOE, there were 16 confirmed bedbug cases in Queens schools, 15 in Brooklyn, two in Manhattan and one in a Bronx school.

When Not Even 7.1 Percent Is Enough Of An Increase

Teacher pay is so low that some dedicated educators have (allegedly) resorted to selling drugs:

Investigators armed with a search warrant stormed into the home of Rishona White, 34, at 1051 Eastern Parkway at 5:30 p.m. after they suspected narcotics were being sold out of the Tilden HS teacher’s house.

After conducting the search, cops found a large amount of heroin, cocaine, and marijuana, police said.

White was charged with criminal possession of a controlled substance with intent to sell. Police are looking into whether she sold drugs in the school or to students.