A new study has found the subways infested with rats. I’m shocked. (Photo via flickr user timmurtaugh)
The New York City Department of Obvious released a study on sanitary conditions in the subway system yesterday, and the findings are incredible. Trash is everywhere! The subways are unclean! Rats have taken over! I had no idea.
Okay. Okay. Let’s try that again with a little less snark.
In an effort to improve health and sanitation conditions in New York City, Mayor Michael Bloomberg’s Department of Health has released a report highlighting the extreme numbers of rats in the city’s subway system. With the MTA strapped for cash and constantly reducing the number of employees available to clean stations, rodents have feasted on garbage that is allowed to fester, and city health officials want to begin the Sisyphean task of combatting the rats.
“We’re actually trying to measure what the factors are directly that cause rats to take advantage of certain stations and not others, so we’re putting some science into this,” Robert Corrigan, a DOH research scientist leading the city’s effort, said yesterday.
For anyone who rides the subway, rats are simply a fact of life. We see these rodents scurrying along the tracks — and sometimes station platforms — searching for something to eat and oblivious to their surroundings. We see families hunt together, and we see rats shimmy themselves into spaces seemingly too small for any living creature. Tales of mutant rats the size of squirrels are passed down as true urban lore, and New Yorkers simply live with the idea that disease-carrying rodents are a New York fact of life.
If the Department of Health has its way, though, the rat population — estimated to be greater than the city’s human population — could start to dwindle. The Times has more on the study:
Rodents, it turns out, reside inside station walls, emerging occasionally from cracks in the tile to rummage for food. The legend of teeming rat cities tucked deep into subway tunnels is, in fact, a myth. The electrified tracks, scientists said, are far too dangerous.
Not every station has rats, although plenty do. Of 18 stations examined in Lower Manhattan, about half of the subway lines got a fair or poor rating for infestation, meaning they exhibited the telltale culprits — overflowing trash cans, too much track litter — that can lead to a rodent jamboree.
But befitting a creature that has evaded annihilation for centuries, officials found no obvious solutions: poison packets and traps have proved no match for an agile mammal known to be diabolically clever.
Rats are and always have been a problem underground, and with trash collection posing problems for the MTA, rats live the good life. Corrigan claimed that trash storage areas where garbage may site for a few days are breeding grounds for the rodents. One family of 8-12 rats can live in one cinderblock in the wall of a storage site, and every wall, he said, can be chock full of rats. As many as 150 rats can live off of the trash found in a storage room with no problems.
Corrigan’s suggestions seemed sparse. As The Times noted, few solutions work, and the scientist wants better insulation that more effectively seals trash rooms and “advanced poison bait technology.” Everyone wants to build a better mouse trap, but the obvious solution, though, is one often left unsaid: Don’t allow people to eat in the subway system.
Rats live off of human garbage and the remains of a sandwich, a french fry or even a speck of chocolate stuck to the wrapper of a Milky Way. Even those pieces of trash that aren’t discarded as litter and find their ways to trash receptacles are fair game for rats that can sneak into garbage cans. But if people aren’t bringing food on their travels, the rats will find less sustenance in the subways. Now who wants to the start the No Food Underground movement?
Leave a Reply