Courtesy Shannon Mannion
An Ottawa resident found a rat in her storage locker in August 2013. Now it seems that the rats are back. She found scat and other droppings in September.They’re not the kind of guests you usually want in your home: with beady eyes, long rubbery tails and sharp teeth. Both rats and mice have been found in the homes of Centretown residents over the last few months.
Centretown resident Shannon Mannion has had her own encounters with rats in her apartment. Back in September, Mannion arrived home one morning to find an ambulance parked outside her building. Her upstairs neighbour, Ludia Lime, called the ambulance.
“There’s three ambulance attendants standing in apartment three, the door was open. They’re standing there and my neighbour, Ludia . . . was lying on the floor in a pool of blood.”
Mannion says a rat had been in Lime’s apartment and when Lime tried to get it out onto the balcony, it had bit her on the toe.
Lime was taken to the hospital and according to Mannion, hasn’t had any reactions from the bite.
A couple days after the incident, Mannion went down into the building’s basement to her storage locker, which she hadn’t visited in nearly a year.
“I was, again, horrified to discover that the rats had been (in) there.”
She says there was rat excrement and urine in the locker, and that many of her possessions in the locker were ruined. “That was there for a year and I didn’t know it, and I’m in the basement a lot . . . there was no smell, there was no indication (that rats were in the locker).”
Dr. Alice Sinia, an entomologist and pest specialist at Orkin Canada, a Canada–wide pest control company, says “rats tend to transmit pathogens either by direct bite – which is very, very rare – or it can be indirectly by contaminating food or water with their droppings or urine.”
Aside from these health effects, Sinia says that rats can chew on electrical wires in the home, which is a fire hazard.
Mannion says she’s tried contacting city officials to no avail, and her landlord has set traps in the basement, but that hasn’t helped with her frustration. Mannion says she doesn’t like the idea of having rattraps in the basement. “If nobody is looking for dead animals, how many of us living in a building and going into our lockers and going into a laundry area [and will] find dead animals or a struggling animal? I don’t want that.”
Mannion believes that the rat infestation is caused by the bi-weekly garbage pickup. “There’s so much garbage. We have a high density population . . . garbage is not being properly managed and not only that, it’s only being collected twice a month . . . It’s everywhere and nobody is handling it properly.”
But rats aren’t the only animals that are making their presence known in Centretown. Mannion says she’s noticed an increase of other wildlife in the area, from raccoons to skunks and squirrels. She also says that other neighbours have been finding mice in their homes and apartments. She says that this increase in wildlife, both in the neighbourhood and in people’s homes, is due to the bi-weekly garbage pickup.
Sinia says a rat will enter a home in search of food, shelter and water.
While garbage can attract rodents, she says, “It depends on how well that garbage is packaged within the garbage bin. It has to be well-sealed, it shouldn’t be littered around and it shouldn’t be over-flowing.” She notes that if rats are attracted to the garbage, it’s because of the smell and the fact that the garbage may be over-flowing. “If it’s well placed, it reduces the chance of it attracting it [rats].”
Don Sharp, one of Mannion’s Centretown neighbours, has had his own encounters with vermin in his home. In late summer, he caught 12 mice in his basement – double the number from the usual five or six. “Every year I catch a couple mice coming into my basement – this year I caught 12.”
Sharp, who also holds a doctorate in public health, believes that the increase of wildlife could be due to the few vacant buildings in the neighbourhood, though he mentions bi-monthly garbage pickup, too. “The green bins attract rodents, I know it attracts squirrels and raccoons. The fact that the trash is only picked up every two weeks instead of once a week – they harbour in trash, they look for food in trash, they live in trash.”
Sharp believes that a rodent problem is only a serious issue if the animals were to “multiply to the point where their competition for food and harbourage brings them into people’s homes where they cause damage and spread disease,” he wrote in an e-mail.
Mannion says she’s been repeatedly telling officials at city hall to do something. “We can’t live like this, this is not right.”