County Jail Extermination Efforts Have Rats, Roaches on the Lam : Vermin: Conditions are ‘significantly improved’ at facilities that were infested a year ago, according to inspectors.

The number of escapes continues to mount at the Orange County Jail, but guards and prisoners alike are cheering these departures.

Annual county health inspection reports show that rats and cockroaches--known to be so bold as to hitch rides on food delivery carts--are breaking out under the heavy fire of local exterminators.

Since 1992, when at least two prisoners were bitten in separate attempts to capture invading rodents, conditions at the Central Men’s Jail and the Intake/Release Center have “significantly improved,” according to inspectors.

The most encouraging note may have been sounded this week by Dr. Hugh F. Stallworth, Orange County’s new public health officer, when he responded to questions about vermin problems at the jail: “I’m hearing about inmates biting inmates. No animal bites, yet.”

According to written reports about inspections of all five county jail facilities during the past year, only the Central Men’s Jail and the Intake/Release Center, both in the Santa Ana Civic Center complex, continued to battle longstanding infestation problems.

During their most recent reviews, inspectors did find live roaches on the walls and floor of the first-floor refrigerator where prisoners’ sack lunches are stored at the Intake/Release Center. And there were occasional sightings of rat droppings, indicating that a “rodent problem still exists.”

But it does not compare to conditions found only a year before, when inspectors noted that rats and roaches had infiltrated administrative offices, kitchens and food storage areas in both the Intake/Release Center and the Central Men’s Jail.

In only a month’s time, the inspectors wrote in the earlier report, nine mice were trapped while roaming an electrical control room next to the Intake/Release Center’s kitchen.

At the same time, in the Central Men’s Jail, rats were munching away on packaged food stored in a basement tunnel. And it was reported that the “magnitude of the . . . cockroach problem suggests that more aggressive pest control is needed.”

“One live adult (roach) was found in a bulk oatmeal container,” inspectors noted.

Since that time, jail officials have gone to war. They have consulted with the Orange County Vector Control District, hired private exterminators and sealed a network of holes, gaps and other openings that once served as vermin freeways inside the local lockups.

Perhaps the best gauge of apparent success in this fight might come from inmate rights attorney Dick Herman, who said Thursday that he has not fielded a prisoner complaint about roaches or rats in some months.

“The complaints were fairly common about a year ago,” Herman said. “I would hear about the rats in the main jail and the mice in the (Intake/Release Center). But it hasn’t come up in a while.”

However, even amid the vermin complaints, Herman said, some inmates assigned to isolation areas for discipline reasons actually seemed to develop a peculiar affinity for cockroaches.

“Being all alone like that in a little cell, the roaches became like pets to some of them,” Herman said. “They would train them, or the roaches would just keep them from going crazy.”

Times staff writer Davan Maharaj contributed to this report.