In response to constituent complaints, the Board of Aldermen voted at their March 10 meeting to have the Inspectional Services Department bait for rodents in two Somerville neighborhoods.

By Ashley Taylor

Sal Lena, owner of Alex Auto Body Shop on Washington Street, has to chase the rats out of his garage.

“We’ve noticed [rats] about six months to a year, and the problem’s getting worse and worse and worse.  And it’s not like a regular, small creature; they’re big!” he said this week.

“I guess they need a place to sleep,” he said. “They get to the point that they chew through the concrete to get in.”

In response to constituent complaints, the Board of Aldermen voted at their March 10 meeting to have the Inspectional Services Department bait for rodents in two Somerville neighborhoods. Interviews in those neighborhoods revealed two groups of people:  those who hadn’t seen any rats, and those who had and thought there was a rat problem.

Ward 1 Alderman Bill Roche described complaints he has received: “Basically, they see them. They see them running in and out of the yards and in the gutter of the street.  When you see a rat, you have a problem.”

At their meeting, the Board approved an order by Roche for the city to bait for rodents—lay rat poison in the sewers—west  of McGrath Highway and north of Pearl Street in East Somerville, not far from Alex Auto Body.

Frank Jones, who lives on McGrath Highway, walks his two dogs from McGrath to Prospect Hill daily and sees rats “almost every other day.”

“It’s especially bad on garbage eve,” he said. “People don’t put lids on garbage cans; it’s as easy as that. The garbage cans are in poor repair. The rats will eat right through the plastic. They’ve done it with my cans.” The damage has galvanized him to consider aluminum trash barrels.

Joe Giambarresi is a sales manager at Security Pest, an extermination service that does work all over Massachusetts, including in Somerville.  “It seems to be a general problem not just in Somerville but in Cambridge as well as Boston,” he said.  “We’ve seen a larger influx of rodents including mice, not just rats, in the past year, everywhere.”

He said rats chew through plastic and lots of other materials.  “They’re chewers; that’s what they do.”

Rodents (from the Latin rodere, to gnaw) are named for their two pairs of incisors on their top and bottom jaws that grow continuously and are sharpened and shortened by gnawing. Yet can a rat gnaw through concrete?   The exterminator replied: “If there’s a hole that’s already there, they can widen it.”

The Board of Aldermen also approved an order by Ward 2 Alderman Maryann Heuston for the City to bait for rodents in the Lincoln Park neighborhood, where, Heuston reported at the meeting, parents can’t let their children play outside for fear of rats.

Aldermen Roche described the baiting process: “They have a contractor come in and they hang a bucket of poison into the sewer system, and then they come back every couple days and they check that bucket, and if the bucket’s being eaten, then they know there’s some activity there, and they continue to bait that area until a period of maybe two weeks when the bucket’s not touched.”

According to Roche, they’ve also asked the Board of Health inspectors to monitor neighborhoods for sources of rodent activity. If the health inspectors find a problem, they will “notify the homeowner that they have to have their property baited and have an exterminator come in and do their property,” Roche said.

That’s where companies like Security Pest come in. “We typically will use child-proof, pet-safe secure bait stations, which are boxes that we place, and there’s bait inside the box, and rodents go inside, they eat the bait, they leave, and it kills them,” Giambarresi said.  Security Pest also provides paperwork to show the City as proof of the extermination.

Giambarressi looked through his records and concluded that the rodent problem is “pretty widespread” in Somerville.

Alderman Roche closed his interview with this comment:  “I don’t think the rodent problem is as bad as it’s being exposed to be in the media. I think we have a rodent problem, but I don’t think we’re overrun with rodents like some media are reporting.  I think it’s a rodent problem; I think the city has it under control, and I think in due time, we’ll be able to take care of it.”