Beverly Center Rids Itself of Rat Plague

The plague of rats that hit the $100-million Beverly Center mall is over, Los Angeles County health officials announced Wednesday.

After an all-out, five-week war on the rats by one of the country’s top exterminating firms, county officials completed an exhaustive two-day examination Wednesday and found not a trace of live rats, said Charles H. McMullen, chief sanitarian of the county’s Department of Health Services.

“We went through every foot of the 30 acres of shops, restaurants and open spaces, and we didn’t find one fresh rat dropping, nothing that wasn’t at least a week old,” McMullen said. “When you go through a complex that size and can’t find one fresh dropping, that’s a real accomplishment. I’m just beat. We even went through vacant areas waiting to be leased. We went up ladders into the worst affected areas above the suspended ceilings where the rats had been running.

“The exterminators have done an outstanding job and they had excellent cooperation from the mall management and individual operators.”

McMullen said he did not know how many rats had been killed during the five weeks at the center, which houses some of the area’s most fashionable shops and restaurants.

A Beverly Center spokeswoman said Wednesday night that only the extermination company would know that. But no officials of the company, Bugs Burger Bug Killers of Miami, could be reached. Their national headquarters and communications center was closed for the night.

“The exterminators brought in their top specialists from all over the United States,” McMullen said. “They spent a week just surveying the center, finding out where the rats were coming in, where they were feeding and breeding and their patterns of movements, so they would know where to attack. Then they laid out bait stations (boxes containing special poison for rats) and glue boards that work like oversized fly traps.”

The experts found the rodents had worked their way from the food establishments and trash bins on the first floor up the trash and elevator shafts to the upper floors.

“They moved vertically as they increased in number and the competition for food, water and breeding areas increased, “ McMullen said.

He said the exterminators had found only “roof rats,” a rodent that measures about a foot from nose to the tip of the tail, and no Norway rats, the kind that go into sewers and which are the most common in Los Angeles. The Norway rat is substantially bigger, meaner and a lot dirtier, according to experts.