Rats! No Snacking--All Because of Those Varmints

After scouring the county’s General Services Agency headquarters last month with an ultraviolet light and seeing rat urine shining back at them, health inspectors determined what employees already knew: The building has a major infestation of roof rats.

Rats have been scurrying through the four-story building in the Civic Center Plaza for the last few months, nibbling on snacks left on desks and sipping from the water bowls beneath the office plants.

Employees have even reported seeing an occasional bold rat scurrying across modular office dividers in the middle of the day.

Officials battled the rats for several weeks, using a battery of spring-loaded traps and a system of 44 ultrasonic devices designed to emit a sound so annoying that they leave rats with migraine headaches. But this week, county officials escalated the war by adopting a new strategy--trying to starve the varmints to death.

“Nobody is to eat in the building,” said Robert G. Love, deputy director of the General Services Agency. Beginning Wednesday, food will be allowed only in the fourth-floor employee break room. Employees will be asked not to eat at their desks or leave food behind in their work areas until the war is won.

In a report on the rat infestation, county health inspectors said the rats feasted on food left behind by employees. Inspectors pointed to gnawed food wrappers found along the walls next to rat droppings as evidence.

Love also will ban live plants from the building to cut off the rats’ water supply.

Hopefully, the food and plant bans will succeed, along with the traps and the continuing program of keeping potential rat entrances to the building sealed off, said Joseph S. Kiraly, a GSA staff analyst in charge of the rat eradication effort.

“We’re doing everything humanly possible,” he said Friday.

With the earlier steps taken to rid the building of rats, eliminating food from work areas probably is the best thing to do now, said William J. Bobbitt, a county vector control technician.

“If you isolate them from food sources, they’re going to have to go to the traps to feed, then you’ve got them,” Bobbitt said.

Rats living in buildings usually don’t bother people because the rats are nocturnal and normally come out at night when the workers are gone, he said.

If people see rats during the day, “it’s an indication that there’s probably a large population of rats or a short supply of food,” he said. “When there’s little food, the young ones and the sick ones have to forage during the day.”

The effort so far appears to be working. Rat traps set up at the start of the infestation were catching about two or three every week, he said. Now, a few weeks go by between catches.

Rats have been common residents of the Civic Center for several years, Bobbitt said. The lush shrubbery around the government buildings provides a safe haven, and trash left behind by people creates a ready food supply, he said.

“The largest problem we have is with the landscaping out there,” he said. The county has been working with the city of Santa Ana, which maintains the area’s landscaping, to come up with a solution, Bobbitt said. But nobody wants to spend the money to rip out and replant shrubbery that deters the roof rat, he said.

Replacing the shrubbery has been considered too expensive, but the county is discussing the problem with Santa Ana officials, said Stan Davidson, chief of general facilities operation for the GSA, which is in charge of maintaining the county buildings.

Even with the rats living in the area, only the GSA headquarters has reported a recent infestation, Davidson said. A nearby building had a rat problem about a year ago, but occupants apparently solved it after getting advice from Orange County Vector Control, he said.

After the rat problem surfaced in the GSA headquarters building, workers sealed vents and ducts to close possible rat entrances. So the problem should be solved once the rats inside are eradicated, Davidson said.

With the rat attack running on several fronts, one weapon purposely is being kept out the anti-rat arsenal: poison.

Last year, GSA used poison to battle rats at a Laguna Niguel trailer set up outside the South Orange County Municipal Court that housed the Public Defenders office. At least one poisoned rat died and began decomposing inside the walls of the trailer, creating a stench so bad that the Public Defenders staff abandoned the trailer. The county later scrapped the trailer.