New York is a City of Many Everything Including Mice, They Claim They Got The Solution
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Even the Mayor of New York Adams has received several summons and fines for having rats in his own buildings.
New York City has long been known for its rat population – but there’s been a dramatic surge in recent years. According to a recent estimate, there are now as many as 3 million rats in New York City, an increase of nearly 1 million over the last decade. They’ve benefited from the food waste left by Covid-era outdoor diners as well as recent cuts to the city’s sanitation department, creating the “perfect storm” for a ratsplosion, says Julie Menin, a city councilmember representing Manhattan’s Upper East Side. Her office has been “inundated” with rat complaints: “We were literally hearing from parents about rats running across their children’s feet as they’re walking them to school.”
Now Menin says her district has an answer: gassing them. Amid the post-Covid rat spike, Menin’s staff researched solutions and learned that Boston and San Diego had started fumigating rats using carbon monoxide. So Menin’s office located an exterminator in New York that uses the technique, a veteran exterminator named Matt Deodato, “and it’s really made a big difference”. Could this be the way to finally rid New York City of its most notorious residents?
To find out, I visited Manhattan’s 86th Street, an elegant tree-lined corridor in Menin’s district that, to Deodato’s trained eye, is more like a conflict zone teeming with defensive features for rats. Deodato points out a crack in the pavement where a tree root has bulged through – “that creates a little gap, and now the rats can get in there and nest”. We near a tree planter, with a pleasant assortment of petunias, and he suddenly halts, pointing out a hole in the soil: “We’ve got an active burrow here.” He sets up his weapon: the new carbon monoxide machine that could be the most effective rat-killing technique New York City has ever seen.
The idea is simple: pump carbon monoxide into the rat burrows in New York City’s yards, parks and tree pits, and the rats will “go to sleep” before suffocating. The gas naturally dissipates afterward, which makes it safer than methods such as poison bait or traps, which can ensnare pets and other wildlife. And it works fast. “We hit hard, kill quick. It just seems more efficient to me than the other systems,” says Deodato.
Wilfred Chan in New York
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