NYC has Gone to Rats

Ines Moore stirs awake nearly every night to an unmistakable, skin-crawling sound: rats skittering around her apartment in the dark.

Sticky traps scattered around the tidy, fifth-floor walkup yield as many as three rats a night, what she believes is just a fraction of the invading army that makes her feel under siege.

"I feel good in the United States — except for this. Here, in my home," said Moore, a Dominican immigrant who can't afford to leave her rent-controlled apartment in northern Manhattan's Washington Heights.

Her neighborhood is among the most rat-infested in New York City, along with West Harlem, Chinatown, the Lower East Side and the South Bronx. They are the focus of the city's latest effort to attack a rat population that some experts estimate could be double that of the Big Apple's 8.4 million people.

Starting next month, the city's 45 inspectors will be bolstered by nine new employees of a pilot program to tackle the vermin in chronically infested neighborhoods where rats have resisted repeated efforts to eradicate them.

Specific targets are rat reservoirs such as parks, sewers, dumping areas and subways where they congregate and breed. The idea is to tamp down the population where it is strongest and keep it from spreading.

"Rats burrow and live in colonies," Health Commissioner Mary Bassett told the City Council at a hearing last month. "I'll sometimes imagine when I walk through a park, if I could have sort of a 'rat vision,' there are all these tunnels under there that are occupied by rats. And from there the rats fan out."

Financed with $611,000 in the current city budget, inspectors will work with neighborhood associations, community boards, elected officials and building owners to plug up holes and put poison in rodent tunnels.

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