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Washington D.C.
Rats As Big As Cats

By Eric Lipton
Washington Post Staff Writer
Saturday, April 17, 1999; Page A01

As dusk drifts into darkness on Euclid Street NW, the end-of-day rituals have begun. Children are tucked into bed, the trash is put out back, living rooms are illuminated by televisions and reading lights.

And in the narrow alley behind the beige stucco row houses, the nightly feeding frenzy is underway. From basement lairs, underground tunnels and countless other hideouts, a hundred rats, maybe more, emerge -- clawing their way up stairwells and fences, dashing across damp pavement, jumping wildly into the air in their nervous battle for nourishment. High-pitched squeals and the patter of tiny feet echo through the alley.

"When night falls, they own the alley," said Noam Brown, whose kitchen window overlooks the feeding grounds. "You open the door and step out and hiss at them [and] the rats will turn and glare at you, sort of like, 'Yes, is there something I can help you with?' "

The nightly scene in Adams-Morgan is far from an anomaly in the District. From Georgia Avenue to Georgetown, from Congress Heights to Cleveland Park, thousands upon thousands of Norway rats take over alleys and yards each night, a testament to a feeble D.C. rodent-control program that city officials acknowledge is so dysfunctional it has created a potential threat to public health.

"Rats as big as cats, rats as big as cats -- I hear that phrase repeated over and over again," said D.C. Council member Jim Graham (D-Ward 1). "I don't think we have a handle on this problem. It's something on a lot of people's minds. It's causing a lot of fear."

It's not the presence of rats that is surprising: Rodents are a fact of life in almost every urban area. It's the extent of the infestation in the District that has caught the attention of a growing number of residents and the new mayor, Anthony A. Williams.

Unlike cities such as Boston and Chicago, which have moved aggressively in recent years to curtail rodent populations, the District has seen a 20 percent jump in rat-related complaints since 1995, including 1,050 filed just since January, according to city records.

The increasing problems with rat infestation mean more than a jarring welcome for residents who might venture into alleys and yards at night. Rats carry as many as 35 diseases, including ratbite fever, salmonella food poisoning and leptospirosis, a flu-like illness. During the past 1,000 years, disease specialists say, the rapidly reproducing rodents have caused more deaths than all the wars and revolutions combined.

On a recent Sunday evening -- two days before the city's trash pickup -- many residents already had filled garbage pails with trash. Several of the pails had no tops, or they had holes in their sides, chewed there by rats. Plastic bags filled with garbage were on the pavement, an easy-access feast for the ever-hungry rodents.

Outside nearby apartment buildings, several dumpsters were overflowing, and one was wide open. One of the buildings has a tiny hole along its rear basement wall, and as one rat after another popped his head in and out of the hole, it became obvious that hundreds of rats have taken over the basement. Each time they slid in and out, they added to the greasy smear that surrounds the hole.

For residents who live in the area, rats are impossible to ignore.

Five-year-old Jessica Palencia sees them nearly every night when she enters her apartment building with her father, marveling as the rodents fight and scamper about. She examines the dead ones up close after they have been flattened by passing cars.

Other neighbors are afraid to let their cats out into the alley, fearing they will be outnumbered by aggressive rats. And Susan Pietrzyk stopped using her back stairwell after she stepped on the wood stairs one night and a horde of rats emerged, several of them running over her feet as they scattered.

"You hear them scurry, and then all of sudden they are at your feet. It is just startling, creepy; it's not at all a nice way to end your day," said Pietrzyk, 33, an international development consultant who has lived on Euclid Street for seven years. She added that the infestation has gotten "significantly worse" in the last year.

None of the neighbors interviewed said they had been bitten by a rat, and they said they weren't aware of any illnesses that had been caused by the rodents. But several had stories of rat-related damage. The lights on Jose Palencia's car have been knocked out several times, after rats apparently gnawed on the wiring to wear down their teeth, which grow up to five inches a year.

"It is like a zoo out here," said Matthew McKeever, 33, a neighbor who still needs to replace the compressor belt on his car's air-conditioner after two rats took a fatal trip to the car's engine. "But it is not funny anymore. Now it is costing me money."

Trouble on Every Block

The city's rat infestation is particularly intense in areas such as Adams-Morgan, where apartment buildings, houses, restaurants and stores are close together. At the Pennsylvania Avenue entrance to Georgetown, rat burrows can be found along nearly every block.

"It flips me out each time I see them," said Isabella Fair, manager at Dream Dresser, a Georgetown clothing store, who frequently spots rats running in the alley behind Wisconsin Avenue. "I run inside and get a broom. I got to get 'em. I got to kill them. The last thing I want is for them to get inside my store."

The Department of Public Works' rat-complaint log reads like a map of the United States: Since January, rats have been sighted on Alabama, Arkansas, Arizona, Connecticut, Colorado, Georgia, Florida, Idaho, Illinois, Indiana, Maryland, Michigan, New Hampshire, New Jersey, New York, North Carolina, Pennsylvania, Rhode Island, South Carolina, South Dakota, West Virginia and Vermont avenues, among dozens of other city streets.

Meryle Secrest, who in January moved to a neighborhood of $500,000 homes on Arizona Terrace in the Palisades section of upper Northwest Washington, was looking out her rear window one recent morning when she noticed an animal "about the size of a small cat" at a backyard bird feeder.

"I got out my binoculars, and only then did I realize I was looking at a rat," said Secrest, author of seven biographies in the fields of art, architecture and music. "I was absolutely horrified. I had not realized I was moving into an area where rats visit bird feeders in broad daylight."

On Brandywine Street NW, one couple has watched in horror as rats floated up into their toilet bowl three times in recent months, an occurrence city officials acknowledge is possible where rats have infiltrated the sewer system.

"They march up and down the street," she said, "like rat parties."

Rat infestation in the District doesn't appear to be as bad as it was in the late 1960s, but city records suggest the problem has worsened in the last four years. In 1995, there were 3,846 rat-related complaints. By last year, that number had climbed to 4,643.

Inspectors with authority over restaurants, trash disposal, public space and housing have gone to neighborhoods with intense rat problems and eliminated food sources and hiding places for rats, said Terry Levin, a spokesman for the Chicago Department of Streets and Sanitation.

"We go door to door, talk to the people, bring them outside and say, 'Look at your back yard, it is full of junk, loose trash [and] dog poop; those are all conditions that allow rats to survive,' " Levin said, adding that in the last two months alone, 40 city restaurants have been closed because of rat problems. "If you try to kill rats one by one, at most it is a holding action. You are merely keeping the population stable."