New York politicians arm city with $2.9m and 'finest expert' to evict rats

They are the brown shadow dragging a pizza crust by the third rail. The terror you feel when descending subway stairs in sandals. The skittering, mangy, foot-long residents of New York.

The city’s politicians are trying, again, to evict them.

A budget agreed to this week by Mayor Bill de Blasio and the city council will, when finalized, increase funding for a rat control program to $2.9m. That is a $2.5m expansion of a pilot program city officials believe is successfully removing the scavengers’ heavily populated dens, called “rat reservoirs”, from city parks and streets.

Exterminators spent the last year developing the $400,000 program in six neighborhoods in Manhattan and the Bronx. As a result, officials said, rat sightings have dropped as much as 90% in East Harlem, the East Village, the Upper West Side, Grand Concourse, Belmont and Mount Hope.

City health workers systematically surveyed 62 blocks to identify 75 sidewalks, 128 sewer catch grates, 46 parks or green spaces and 41 tree pits with active rodent signs. The sewer catches were baited 159 times, dozens of cracks and holes in sidewalks were plugged and rats were successfully removed from more than half of the trees.

“Thats what this new approach is – it’s science,” said Robert “Bobby” Corrigan, who for many years was New York’s rodentologist. He is considered one of the finest urban rat experts in the country, and in 2008 was inducted into the Pest Management Professionals’ hall of fame.

Corrigan and some other fine scientific minds, including PhD research scientists, masters of public health and physicians, have been trying to solve New York’s rat problem for decades, through the tenure of several mayors. The new approach developed by the city’s department of health, which Corrigan helped write, aims to “analyze the population and figure out why there are so many rats in certain areas”.

The problem is challenging, Corrigan said, largely because of the smorgasbord that New York offers city vermin. “It’s ironic because it’s a human-being condition more than it is the rat condition,” he said, adding slowly and deliberately: “Sanitation is rat control.”

Corrigan notes how much food it takes to sustain an average rat family living in New York City. If a clan of 16 is living under a neighborhood sewer grate, and each rodent needs about one ounce of food daily, then together the rat family is devouring one pound of food from city streets each night.

Just how big of a challenge New York City exterminators will face in taking on the whole rat population, those familiar with the scenario say, is almost impossible to know.

In 1949, the rat population was estimated at 15 million, the New York Times reported. One rat per person is a common, if unsupported, refrain in New York.

Asked how many rats lived in the city, Metropolitan Transportation Authority (MTA) spokesperson Kevin Ortiz said: “No idea. Impossible to count.”

He added: “No one knows.”

The city has spent years trying to resolve this conundrum. Another recent effort sought to index the city’s rat population in private property. City inspectors catalogued enforcement efforts at 36,000 properties across 11 neighborhoods, encompassing an area in which roughly 777,000 people lived.

The result was an intensive public outreach and code enforcement campaign that fined building owners for not cleaning up detritus or attempting to resolve rat problems. The city also looked to publicly shame building owners, creating the “rat information portal” (RIP) which mapped the level of rat infestation in a given neighborhood.

Even so, the study’s authors acknowledged that efforts were limited without considering rodents in subways and sewers.

“Depending on the environmental conditions of that block there could be three, four, 10 rats per person,” said Corrigan. “If you go three blocks away, it could be zero rats per person. I think it’s fair to say there’s probably several million rats in New York City.”

Rats are vectors for all sorts of infectious disease. Take, for example, leptospirosis. The bacteria is transmitted by rodents worldwide. Initially, an infected individual may not have any symptoms, but as time passes the disease can cause meningitis and even death, according to the CDC.

In the first study of its kind in 90 years, Columbia University etymologists trapped 133 common New York rats, also known as the Norway rat, to examine bugs that piggyback throughout the city. They found oriental rat fleas, capable of transmitting bubonic plague, as well 6,500 fleas, ticks and mites.

The effort to remove the rat from subway platforms and tracks has also beefed up. The transit system alone spends $1.3m per year baiting rats and sealing off garbage.

“We’re trying to use the latest state-of-the-art technology,” MTA chairman Thomas Prendergast said on Wednesday, according to the New York Post.

In addition to powerful “vacuum drains” that the Post reports can suck garbage from subway tracks, Prendergast was likely referring to rat birth control that is being developed for use in American cities by SenesTech.

The company’s website boasts of technology that can “accelerate the depletion of eggs in female rats and cause testicular disruption in male rats”.

The MTA’s Kevin Ortiz said the product was being tested in Chicago, but that New York was likely to try it.