Speaker 1: Hi, It's West Casova. We're taking a break this week
Speaker 1: for the holidays, so here's an episode you might have
Speaker 1: missed from Bloomberg News and iHeartRadio. It's The Big Take.
Speaker 1: I'm West Casova. Today we go out in the city
Speaker 1: looking for rats. The number of rat related complaints in
Speaker 1: American cities has spiked in recent years, which will come
Speaker 1: as no surprise to anyone who's taken an evening stroll
Speaker 1: in New York or Chicago or here where I live Washington,
Speaker 1: d C. They are fearless and they're all over the place,
Speaker 1: which made us wonder are there more rats now than
Speaker 1: there were before? Like, did the pandemic cause a rat
Speaker 1: baby boom? Cities have tried and failed for decades to
Speaker 1: control rat populations without much luck, So what can be
Speaker 1: done to get rid of them? Fortunately, my intrepid colleagues
Speaker 1: here at The Big Take podcast set out to answer
Speaker 1: those questions. Producers Katherine Fink in Washington and Rebecca Shassan
Speaker 1: and Sam Gobauer in New York are here to tell
Speaker 1: us what they found. Catherine, Rebecca, Sam, nice to have
Speaker 1: you on this side of the microphone.
Speaker 2: Oh, thank you for having us.
Speaker 3: Wes wouldn't be anywhere else.
Speaker 4: It's going to be fun, Rebecca.
Speaker 5: To start.
Speaker 1: Let me ask you, most people I know, me included,
Speaker 1: don't exactly love rats. No one is happy to cross
Speaker 1: paths with one of them on the street. But for
Speaker 1: the most part, they keep to themselves. Why do we
Speaker 1: need to get rid of them?
Speaker 3: This is one of the big questions that I set
Speaker 3: out to answer, So I asked rodentologists doctor Bobby Corrigan
Speaker 3: to break it down. Here's what he told me.
Speaker 5: They live in dirty areas, so you know when an
Speaker 5: animal forges in and around all this trash we're talking about.
Speaker 5: We know when trash goes bad right and gets rotten, right.
Speaker 5: We don't need it because we worry about getting sick.
Speaker 5: So the king food attracts various bacteria viruses that can
Speaker 5: hurt us and even in some cases kill us. If
Speaker 5: you get on CDC dot gov and you put in rats,
Speaker 5: you'll see that rats are listed of being associated with
Speaker 5: about fifty five different diseases. So disease is the second thing.
Speaker 5: The third thing that's off and overlooked is rats. Getting
Speaker 5: we look at all these buildings around us, well, I
Speaker 5: can guarantee you we're looking at about went to the
Speaker 5: varge about eight fairly old apartment buildings right across the
Speaker 5: street here. Rats have been in those ceilings and they
Speaker 5: will make their burrow instead of the earth. The burrows
Speaker 5: will be in between each floor. So it's back to
Speaker 5: they were chewing on twigs and stems and all kinds
Speaker 5: of branches. That's their natural life, even before the way cities.
Speaker 5: So when a rat is in a ceiling living close
Speaker 5: to someone, and you're in the ceiling has electrical wires,
Speaker 5: so you can see the issue. So they start chewing
Speaker 5: on electrical wires, and the electrical wire sparks, and literally
Speaker 5: they can burn a house down and have burnt houses there.
Speaker 3: You'll be hearing a lot more from doctor Corrigan later on.
Speaker 1: Okay, so now that we've established that, Catherine, you actually
Speaker 1: went to see for yourself exactly how our fine city, Washington,
Speaker 1: DC is trying to control the rat population. And to
Speaker 1: be honest, I'm a little squeamish to find out the answer.
Speaker 2: Maybe for good reasonles that question led me to the
Speaker 2: Brightwood neighborhood in Northwest DC.
Speaker 6: So you the crew, I'm the crew.
Speaker 5: Me.
Speaker 2: You have a much bigger crew than I do. Scared
Speaker 2: of I'm not scared of rats? Am I about to
Speaker 2: see a lot of rats? Yeah?
Speaker 3: Yeah, I'm running.
Speaker 5: I might need to give you a shovel.
Speaker 2: You can, Oh yeah, as long as I can do
Speaker 2: it with one hand.
Speaker 1: I'm willing.
Speaker 7: This would this would be a perfect place for me
Speaker 7: to bring people that they want to smell wreck.
Speaker 8: I wish I could bottle it up and smell it.
Speaker 2: What what a rat smell like to you?
Speaker 5: Take a rent?
Speaker 2: Okay, m hm, Oh yeah, that's bad. That's not good.
Speaker 1: You might need to get a shovel, Catherine. Okay, how
Speaker 1: did this little meet up come about?
Speaker 2: Okay, I cannot emphasize this enough that I had no
Speaker 2: idea what I was walking into. So I reached out
Speaker 2: to DC's Rodent and Vector Control team. You heard some
Speaker 2: of the folks there and clip they're part of the
Speaker 2: Department of Health. And basically they gave me an address
Speaker 2: and I went that is all I knew going in.
Speaker 2: So that smell I referenced was coming from this big
Speaker 2: shed that was full of garbage cans in front of
Speaker 2: an apartment complex. And the rodent control team told me
Speaker 2: that this is a rat hotspot. They estimate that over
Speaker 2: twenty rat burrows are underground there, And just for context,
Speaker 2: a burrow is at least a dozen rats, and one
Speaker 2: to two burrows is pretty typical in a residential yard,
Speaker 2: so that kind of gives you a sense of just
Speaker 2: how bad the problem was. So about two hundred and
Speaker 2: forty rats. The team comes to treat the site about
Speaker 2: every two weeks.
Speaker 3: So how many people are part of this team that's
Speaker 3: doing this treatment.
Speaker 2: When I got there, there were about seven guys or so.
Speaker 2: They all had shovels in hand. I had no idea
Speaker 2: what the shovels were for or what I was about
Speaker 2: to see. And then they turned on the machine.
Speaker 8: Let me get in the wool zone.
Speaker 2: So we've got this green contraption. It sort of looks
Speaker 2: like a lawnmower. I guess it's currently pumping chemicals underground
Speaker 2: where the rats are burrowing. So occasionally we're seeing some
Speaker 2: pop out of the holes.
Speaker 5: Ope, oh oh.
Speaker 2: That was the sound of a shovel smacking the concrete
Speaker 2: as the team attempts to kill an escape rat. Unclear
Speaker 2: if they actually got them or not. This is not
Speaker 2: for the faint of heart.
Speaker 1: Okay, that was way worse than I was expecting. Catherine,
Speaker 1: So we heard a lot of sounds, and that we
Speaker 1: heard that sound of the machine. We definitely heard the
Speaker 1: sound of that shovel smacking something. But describe what they
Speaker 1: were doing. How were they trying to get rid of
Speaker 1: all those rats that were underground.
Speaker 2: After they turned the machines off. I learned that the
Speaker 2: team was basically pumping carbon monoxide into the ground, which
Speaker 2: suffocates the rats on mass almost immediately. Some of them
Speaker 2: scurried out of the ground and were chased with shovels.
Speaker 2: That's what you heard there, and the team did this
Speaker 2: treatment a few times on both sides of the street.
Speaker 2: I asked Gerard Brown, who's the program manager for the
Speaker 2: DC rodent invector controlled team, all about this, and he
Speaker 2: told me there's really no way to know how many
Speaker 2: rats they exterminated, so we have that estimate twenty or
Speaker 2: so burrows. But because the ground is their final resting place,
Speaker 2: the city is basically left with a rat graveyard and
Speaker 2: they don't really know what's under there.
Speaker 3: That all sounds pretty terrible for you, Like how many
Speaker 3: times a day does this team have to pump carbon
Speaker 3: monoxide into the ground and slap rats over the head
Speaker 3: with shovels.
Speaker 2: The short answer is many times a day. But I'm
Speaker 2: gonna let Gerard Brown answer that question.
Speaker 7: So inspect the performers go twelve complaints a day, twelve
Speaker 7: and then when they finished their twelve, then they go
Speaker 7: to hotspots something like this where they've been working on
Speaker 7: you know, So the complaint's been going up.
Speaker 2: Yeah, I read somewhere that last year the complaints had
Speaker 2: doubled or even more than doubled since twenty eighteen. I'm curious,
Speaker 2: are there more rots?
Speaker 4: Have they migrated?
Speaker 2: Maybe, you know, because of the space of the pandemic.
Speaker 7: So the uptick, I believe comes from a few things,
Speaker 7: you know, the mild winners for the last decade, the
Speaker 7: more people over seven hundred thousand people in DC that
Speaker 7: live here. And then the visitors come in and go,
Speaker 7: and then you have food establishments twenty five percent of
Speaker 7: new food established within the last two years, you know.
Speaker 7: And then the pandemic hit and people work from home.
Speaker 7: Where they work from home, they generate more trash. People
Speaker 7: don't use their garbage proes like this shoot. You know,
Speaker 7: those containers that the food comes in, they throw them
Speaker 7: in the trend without washing them out.
Speaker 3: Yeah, garbage and sanitation is going to be a major
Speaker 3: theme in this episode. Definitely more on that later.
Speaker 2: So as far as rat control goes, there's carbon monoxide,
Speaker 2: and I asked Brown what other techniques the team uses
Speaker 2: to keep the rat population under control. He told me
Speaker 2: they also use what's called tracking powder. Basically, they shoot
Speaker 2: it in a hole in the ground and it gets
Speaker 2: on the rats fur and when the rats groom themselves,
Speaker 2: they ingust the powder and die. So still pretty grim.
Speaker 2: But there are also less conventional methods on the table
Speaker 2: that don't always entail killing rats. For example, contraception. So
Speaker 2: back in twenty nineteen, the DC team piloted rat birth control.
Speaker 2: I also wanted to ask Brown about something I'd read
Speaker 2: about that was happening in Chicago using feral cats to
Speaker 2: fight the rats.
Speaker 7: Were plan on using cats, but it's a company that
Speaker 7: hands goals no most metarians, but we get pushedback. You know,
Speaker 7: people don't want dogs killing rats, so we're not gonna
Speaker 7: do that, got it? Yeah, I'll go buy a whole
Speaker 7: bunch of lis.
Speaker 1: Catherine. Listening to all of this, it seems like cities
Speaker 1: are just not up to the job, like the rats
Speaker 1: are gonna win. How did all of this end? How
Speaker 1: did you leave it.
Speaker 2: I thank the team for letting me pry during a
Speaker 2: very routine part of their day. We took a photo together.
Speaker 2: Then Brown asked me for my address. I told him,
Speaker 2: and he knew my exact block well, in large part
Speaker 2: because it is such a hospitable area for uts. He
Speaker 2: said that he's going to bring the team by sometime
Speaker 2: to help get this problem under control. So that was
Speaker 2: pretty exciting. But I think ultimately what I took away
Speaker 2: from this experience, besides just how visceral it was, was
Speaker 2: just the serious limitations of these methods of rat control
Speaker 2: and how a city like DC can get ahead of
Speaker 2: the problem.
Speaker 1: Catherine, Rebecca, and Sam assure me that by the end
Speaker 1: of this episode they will actually reveal how cities can
Speaker 1: get control of rats. We'll start talking about that after
Speaker 1: the break. All right, Rebecca, you've answered my question. Why
Speaker 1: do we have to get rid of rats? Catherine told
Speaker 1: us they're really hard to get rid of.
Speaker 5: What do we do?
Speaker 2: Yeah?
Speaker 3: So, I've never had any particular fondness for rats out
Speaker 3: in their natural urban habitat, but through the reporting process
Speaker 3: on this story, I realized that I actually have no
Speaker 3: idea what the answers to that question, though, I reached
Speaker 3: out to somebody I knew could help me out, doctor
Speaker 3: Bobby Corrigan. This man has a PhD in Urban rodentology
Speaker 3: from Purdue. He consults with you as cities on their
Speaker 3: pest problems, and basically any question you have about rats,
Speaker 3: he can answer it. He answered all of my questions
Speaker 3: ever so patiently, all while we were taking what he
Speaker 3: called a rat walk about around the city. Oh see,
Speaker 3: over here is one right there. It's scaried underneath the
Speaker 3: roly bin, and there he goes down that ramp. This
Speaker 3: was a little unexpected because around this time it was
Speaker 3: about ten thirty in the morning, and according to doctor Corrigan,
Speaker 3: that is long after a rat's general bedtime.
Speaker 5: I usually say two hours past. Gosk is your rat
Speaker 5: rat o'clock?
Speaker 3: It didn't seem like all that big a threat, just
Speaker 3: to see one rat hanging out on this plastic dumpster.
Speaker 3: But behind us was a trash can with an ad
Speaker 3: that said the opposite.
Speaker 5: Says a little litter cant can lead to big problems,
Speaker 5: and then has a silhouette of a big scary We
Speaker 5: gotta make rats scary. You know, it's Hollywood. They love
Speaker 5: to make rats scary. Some great scientists out in Vancouver.
Speaker 5: They published a paper in twenty nineteen showing that when
Speaker 5: rats get close to us and live in our quarters,
Speaker 5: psychologically it really whacks us out. We can't deal with it.
Speaker 5: We feel attacked, we feel invaded, and so forth. So
Speaker 5: we cannot have our serenity in our own nests that
Speaker 5: we depend on. And you see a rat skurry across
Speaker 5: your living room floor when you sit down to relax,
Speaker 5: or in your kitchen when you get up at night
Speaker 5: to get a snack or something, a rat goes across
Speaker 5: the kitchen sink, you're not going back to sleep.
Speaker 3: Doctor Corgan told me to figure out how to get
Speaker 3: rid of the rats. You've got to figure out what
Speaker 3: makes them tick.
Speaker 5: When I was a kid, I love Sherlock Holmes, so
Speaker 5: I think that's why I'm a rodentologist. It's always Sherlock Holmes,
Speaker 5: and so when I walk about in parks, I usually
Speaker 5: typically want to see where their burrows are. It's a
Speaker 5: little bit like I like the troutfish with fly fishing,
Speaker 5: and you learn how to read the stream, so there
Speaker 5: won't be burrows any old place in the park. There'll
Speaker 5: be burrows, specifically in some areas in the park, and
Speaker 5: that's what we're gonna look for. Now. One of the
Speaker 5: things I'm gonna be visually searching for, you know, is
Speaker 5: to see anything heavy, like ornamental rocks that we may
Speaker 5: plant or naturally occurring rocks. So here, right here, we
Speaker 5: have a very large rock. You'll notice this big amount
Speaker 5: of soil here with all the gravelly look to it.
Speaker 5: That tells you that's the main entrance. So rats have
Speaker 5: a nest that is typically six feet long and has
Speaker 5: three doors. One is the main door and two are
Speaker 5: what we call escape holes, you know, or we could
Speaker 5: think of them like we have side doors and back
Speaker 5: doors to our own homes. But this is classic. There's
Speaker 5: another factor here, as I keep stressing it, and that
Speaker 5: is even though that would make good for a good
Speaker 5: apartment complex, the question is is it in Philly close
Speaker 5: proximity to getting out of the house, getting to their
Speaker 5: food quickly and getting back to the house safely. Because
Speaker 5: we have a major thoroughfare right out on the street here,
Speaker 5: and you'll notice restaurants right so from here, even you know,
Speaker 5: along the street in any direction is within the home
Speaker 5: range of these rats easily. Research has shown good research
Speaker 5: recent research has shown, you know, a city rat it
Speaker 5: can start a ninety feet in any direction for the
Speaker 5: short end of the home range, and go all the
Speaker 5: way up to four hundred and ninety five hundred feet
Speaker 5: in any direction. So these rats are going to benefit
Speaker 5: probably from the bounty of what that that busy street
Speaker 5: with the restaurant's offers.
Speaker 3: From there, Doctor Corgan and I left the park and
Speaker 3: we kept on truck, and our walk about continued down
Speaker 3: one of the side streets nearby. So in the park
Speaker 3: you were looking for hard surfaces that they could borrow under.
Speaker 3: Now we're walking on sidewalk and there's asphalt streets to
Speaker 3: the left. What are you looking for here?
Speaker 5: What I'm looking for here is as sidewalks ass mentulia.
Speaker 5: As they get older themselves, we will see the old
Speaker 5: sidewalk is deteriorating, right, and.
Speaker 3: So corner's kind of falling apart is just missing.
Speaker 5: You know. For me, every time I see any kind
Speaker 5: of a shadow or a crack, you know, when I
Speaker 5: walk with my wife sometimes we're going someplace fun for
Speaker 5: dinner or something, and she can tell. She can tell like, Okay,
Speaker 5: you're looking for rats. You know, we're gonna have a
Speaker 5: good time. Right, I'm like, you bet, we're gonna have
Speaker 5: a great time. So you know, it's hard to shut
Speaker 5: it off sometimes, I guess, is my point, you know,
Speaker 5: but that's I don't know the world of a rodentologist.
Speaker 5: It's how can you shut it off? So you know,
Speaker 5: here we have this you know, cobblestone, and it's very active.
Speaker 5: Yeah you know we can see yeah, thank you. Here
Speaker 5: he said it's a home for rats. He must live here,
Speaker 5: so so it's very you know, it's in our face
Speaker 5: all the time, all the time.
Speaker 3: In a city that's getting older, there are holes and
Speaker 3: harbors for rats all over the place. After maybe twenty
Speaker 3: minutes with doctor Corrigan, I couldn't stop myself from interrupting
Speaker 3: him every couple of minutes or so, what's that? What
Speaker 3: about that one? These little holes and cracks in the sidewalk,
Speaker 3: I just couldn't stop seeing them. But he told me
Speaker 3: that there are some simple telltale signs to tell the
Speaker 3: difference between a hole and a home.
Speaker 5: So that's ale and it's very active. And the reason
Speaker 5: you would know, as a rat detective kind of thing,
Speaker 5: that is very active as when rats travel, one is
Speaker 5: they lose hair, with two is their coats are always
Speaker 5: dirty and greasy, and they don't have shampoo, so as
Speaker 5: they come and go, you will notice.
Speaker 4: Right here a grease stain.
Speaker 3: There is this little oblong hole right on the edge
Speaker 3: of the sidewalk, and it has this kind of dark
Speaker 3: brownish grayish, vaguely shiny but too dirty to be called
Speaker 3: shiny splotch just to the right of it. And that's
Speaker 3: how he knew that this was a rat port of entry.
Speaker 4: The grease stain.
Speaker 2: Disgusting, illuminating. Rebecca, you told me about this recently, and
Speaker 2: I saw the photo you took, and I have to
Speaker 2: say it really changed things for me. I've told everyone,
Speaker 2: my parents, my roommates, I am always on the lookout
Speaker 2: for that grease stain.
Speaker 6: Though.
Speaker 4: Yeah, it's now a regular part of my nightly walks
Speaker 4: is to look for these grease stains. I.
Speaker 1: However, am going to do everything I can not to
Speaker 1: see any grease stains.
Speaker 3: Well for anyone who's also looking for other signs, maybe
Speaker 3: there's not a grease stain, but you still feel convinced
Speaker 3: that there's a ratneath that sidewalk. Doctor Corgan told me
Speaker 3: that's another telltale sign. As the rats tunnel they leave
Speaker 3: the sidewalk without support underneath, they dig out all the
Speaker 3: dirt and so then there's just empty space and that
Speaker 3: can't hold up the heavy sidewalk, so it just cracks
Speaker 3: under the weight.
Speaker 5: Rebecca.
Speaker 1: This leads to one of the other big questions I had,
Speaker 1: which is, in a city like New York, just how
Speaker 1: many rats are there under the streets?
Speaker 3: Wes. I'm going to do you the favor that doctor
Speaker 3: Corrigan did for me. I'm gonna let you down easy.
Speaker 3: Nobody knows.
Speaker 5: Is there a method to quantify the number of rats
Speaker 5: in the city. The answers, No, there's a lot of
Speaker 5: tunnels lower feet and they go every single which way,
Speaker 5: and they're piled on top of each other and this
Speaker 5: kind of thing. They're tunnel shaped mammals. And so when
Speaker 5: we built our cities around the world, all our cities
Speaker 5: are like this. And it's not that the rats are
Speaker 5: living inside the pipes, but when we put in a pipe,
Speaker 5: we have to create a space for that.
Speaker 1: No, I'm sorry, that is not an acceptable answer in
Speaker 1: a podcast episode dedicated to getting rid of rats and cities.
Speaker 1: So I'm gonna need at least a ballpark.
Speaker 4: Figure this is the best we can do.
Speaker 5: For you.
Speaker 4: A study from twenty fourteen published in the Journal of
Speaker 4: the Royal Statistical Society estimates that there are about two
Speaker 4: million rats in New York City.
Speaker 2: And I have to say this study from twenty fourteen
Speaker 2: has gotten a lot of play. If you google Saxon
Speaker 2: figures about how many rats are in America's big cities,
Speaker 2: this is all you are going to get. I asked
Speaker 2: Jared Brown in DC the same question. Here's what he
Speaker 2: told me.
Speaker 7: There's no way you can know how many rests in
Speaker 7: that area, you know, so we just measure a complise,
Speaker 7: but we know it is the increase in complaise those
Speaker 7: increase in.
Speaker 4: Rets, right.
Speaker 3: That's basically what doctor Corgan was telling me. There's no
Speaker 3: way to know how many rats there are because there's
Speaker 3: no way to know where all the rats are. There's
Speaker 3: just too many places that they could be.
Speaker 5: So the amazing thing about the rat and its space
Speaker 5: is if if the skull can fit through the rest
Speaker 5: of the body, can do the limbo. So what you
Speaker 5: need is a half inch height for a skull twelve
Speaker 5: millimeters one basketball space can harbor an entire family of
Speaker 5: rats because they like to hugger mugger together. And they
Speaker 5: all get really close and inside the basketball They're like,
Speaker 5: this is a great apartment, right, they can do that.
Speaker 1: They're true New Yorkers, True, they are.
Speaker 5: They're true New Yorkers, and true you know every.
Speaker 1: Place after break rats hate this one simple effects.
Speaker 5: So all over the world, you know, in my contacts
Speaker 5: and my travels for the cities I do, surveys in
Speaker 5: rat populations are up globally. We're not sure why, but
Speaker 5: you know, the scientists we get together and we think
Speaker 5: along these lines global warming. The winters are less severe.
Speaker 5: Repeatedly for the past decade, we've had the warmest decade
Speaker 5: in old history. That's one thing, too, is human populations
Speaker 5: are increasing. More humans, more trash, more protein. Cities are
Speaker 5: getting older, whatever city you want to pick, they're getting older.
Speaker 5: As the city gets older, the infrastructures keep deteriorating. That's
Speaker 5: why I pointed out the patries here. So as buildings deteriorate,
Speaker 5: the foundations deteriorate, the suites deteriorate, infrastructure deteriorates, we create
Speaker 5: more inaccessible harborages for an animal that only needs twelve
Speaker 5: meli meters.
Speaker 3: At this point in the walk about, I was kind
Speaker 3: of starting to get it. Why killing the ones that
Speaker 3: we can find just doesn't quite cut it. As far
Speaker 3: as controlling the population, Doctor Corgan told me an example
Speaker 3: of a better solution was in a pretty surprising place.
Speaker 3: The pandemic.
Speaker 5: You know, the city was shut down. All the cities
Speaker 5: that Philadelphia was shut down, all the East coast cities,
Speaker 5: the West coast, all the cities shut down for a
Speaker 5: couple of months. We were like no restaurants. The rats
Speaker 5: themselves were stressed. So when they used to come out
Speaker 5: at night in any city and try to get food
Speaker 5: in what used to be every night the dumpster had food,
Speaker 5: well no more dumpster. They need food just like we
Speaker 5: need food. So I was doing surveys right after the
Speaker 5: pandemic shut down. I saw rats going at each other.
Speaker 5: I saw rats attacking each other. I saw colonies comte
Speaker 5: dely leave the area for parts unknon probably residential trash,
Speaker 5: quite frankly. But after that we hurt them numbers. We
Speaker 5: don't know by how many, probably hundreds of thousands, maybe
Speaker 5: millions of rats to come during that period.
Speaker 2: Also, Gerard Brown and DC told me earlier that COVID
Speaker 2: led to a huge surge and residential trash because so
Speaker 2: many people were working from home, so in DC, at
Speaker 2: least in those early days, neighborhood rats had a field day.
Speaker 2: But I guess the bottom line here is that there's
Speaker 2: a direct link between the amount of garbage in an
Speaker 2: area and the size of the rat population. Rats cannot
Speaker 2: thrive without nearby trash. Remember how we said they only
Speaker 2: travel a few hundred feet. That means in a place
Speaker 2: like New York City, rats who'd made restaurant leftovers their
Speaker 2: food staple were down on their luck in twenty twenty.
Speaker 4: Yeah, and rat populations here in New York actually fell
Speaker 4: to historic lows during lockdow. But as the city came back,
Speaker 4: so did the rat population big time. Rebecca and I
Speaker 4: got a chance to speak to New York City's Sanitation Commissioner,
Speaker 4: Jessica Tish. She told us that budget cuts to the
Speaker 4: department early in the pandemic made a city already famous
Speaker 4: for filth even dirtier, which made a perfect breeding ground
Speaker 4: for rat resurgence.
Speaker 8: I think most New Yorkers noticed that the city got
Speaker 8: meaningfully dirtier, and we are intent on cleaning it up.
Speaker 6: One of the reasons the city.
Speaker 8: Got dirtier during the pandemic to my mind, is at
Speaker 8: the very beginning of it. The cleanliness function was completely
Speaker 8: defunded from the Department of Sanitation, and those are their
Speaker 8: basic bread and butter services, So things like clearing out
Speaker 8: the litter baskets so that they don't overflow on street corners,
Speaker 8: sweeping the streets so that our curb lines aren't riddled
Speaker 8: with litter, cleaning the highway on an off ramps. Those
Speaker 8: basic things were completely cut at the beginning of the
Speaker 8: pandemic in March or April of twenty twenty, and Mayor
Speaker 8: Adams not only restored them, but funded them at the
Speaker 8: highest levels that New York City has ever seen.
Speaker 4: And Mayor Eric Adams famously hates rats. Everyone that knows
Speaker 4: me they know one thing.
Speaker 2: I hate rats.
Speaker 5: I hate rats.
Speaker 4: I'm terrified of rats so much so that New York
Speaker 4: is actually hiring a rats Are to take charge of
Speaker 4: all things road and control related. The job postings asking
Speaker 4: for someone and I quote somewhat bloodthirsty who's able to
Speaker 4: burrow into the depths of city government to get the
Speaker 4: job done. Commissioner Tish says that managing our waste equals
Speaker 4: managing the rat population, and New York produces a lot
Speaker 4: of trash.
Speaker 6: To give you some context, keep in mind that every
Speaker 6: day New Yorkers put out twenty four million pounds of
Speaker 6: trash and recycling on our curbs.
Speaker 4: That's every day, every single day.
Speaker 8: That is twenty four million pounds that sits on our
Speaker 8: curbs for fourteen hours a day.
Speaker 4: It's a lot, but that's about to change. A new
Speaker 4: policy that starts in April is really going to cut
Speaker 4: down on the amount of time those bags sit out
Speaker 4: and the rats, they are not going to be happy
Speaker 4: about it.
Speaker 8: We know that one third of all material in the
Speaker 8: black bags is organic waste, it's food, and so you
Speaker 8: can see how shrinking the amount of time that those
Speaker 8: black bags sit on the curb will actually make quite
Speaker 8: a meaningful difference in how the city looks and feels,
Speaker 8: to say nothing of the fact that the black bags
Speaker 8: right now serve as the all you can.
Speaker 6: Eat buffet for rats. It's like the all night, all
Speaker 6: you can eat buffet for rats.
Speaker 8: And so one of the goals of shrinking the amount
Speaker 8: of time time that the bags spend on the curb
Speaker 8: is shutting down that all night, all you can eat
Speaker 8: rat biffe, or at least dramatically limiting it's ours.
Speaker 2: So here in DC, the impact of garbage and garbage
Speaker 2: collection is definitely on people's minds, but we haven't seen
Speaker 2: a change like the one in New York yet. There
Speaker 2: are plenty of residents, though, who want to get ahead
Speaker 2: of this problem by changing up the way we handle
Speaker 2: our trash. Like Kim Patterson, who is the Advisory Neighborhood
Speaker 2: Commissioner for Brightwood. She goes one of a bunch of
Speaker 2: community members who came by while the road and Control
Speaker 2: team serviced the block.
Speaker 9: It's getting worse. There's garbage. You can see that the
Speaker 9: garbage bins are not secure. The owner pays the fines
Speaker 9: and still doesn't secure the cans. The residents are terrified
Speaker 9: to throw their trash there. They open the door. There's rats.
Speaker 9: Our trash cans are plastic. The rownas eat through them.
Speaker 9: Just give us a new can.
Speaker 4: We have all these rules.
Speaker 9: There's a hole in the can that the homeowner did
Speaker 9: not cause, it was the rat. Also, the trash cans
Speaker 9: that are public, they are open. There's no lid. Let's
Speaker 9: get some type of control where the trash can be
Speaker 9: in closed so the rest don't fest and feast every night.
Speaker 3: Yeah, poisons all well and good as an immediate solution.
Speaker 3: If you've got a problem, you've got to handle it.
Speaker 3: But controlling the rat's food supply aka the trash supply,
Speaker 3: can cut their population down at the source. The only
Speaker 3: problem with that it requires a serious amount of buy
Speaker 3: in from all of us.
Speaker 5: If you give the rat one bad property out of
Speaker 5: ten beautiful properties, that one bad property will feed the
Speaker 5: entire block rats just that one property. The whole block
Speaker 5: comes down based on one bad neighbor. It takes everybody
Speaker 5: to be honest with you, and most people do not
Speaker 5: want to be involved in rat control duties. When they
Speaker 5: get up every day, it's the last thing on their
Speaker 5: radar screen, you know. And there's the weakness nobody gets.
Speaker 5: Some says, gee, I wonder if I should do a
Speaker 5: rat serving my own property and cut it off at
Speaker 5: the past. Everyone says, gee, I have rats. They pick
Speaker 5: up the phone, pick up the yellow pages, so to speak,
Speaker 5: and call somebody to put out some poison.
Speaker 1: Thanks to Catherine, Rebecca and Sam, and thanks to you
Speaker 1: for listening to us here at the Big Take. It's
Speaker 1: a daily podcast from Ploomberg and iHeartRadio for more shows
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Speaker 1: us questions or comments to Big Take at ploomberg dot net.
Speaker 1: The supervising producer of The Big Take is Vicky Bergalina,
Speaker 1: Our senior producer is Katherine Fink, our producer is Rebecca Shassan,
Speaker 1: and our associate producer is Sam Gebauer. Raphael I'm Seely
Speaker 1: is our engineer. Our original music was composed by Leo
Speaker 1: Sidrin I'm west Kasova. We'll be back tomorrow with another
Speaker 1: Big Take.
Speaker 2: H