The Cleveland Rat Invasion

This is freaking scary.

Rat invasions rattle suburban homeowners
Finding beady eyes in toilet rare, but calls for poison are up
Wednesday, September 08, 2004
Mark RollenhagenPlain Dealer Reporter

Denise Roberts can attest that a rat popping up in a toilet is not merely a suburban myth. It has happened in her tidy Euclid bungalow. Twice.

The first time, she saw the mucky, dirty water in her basement bathroom and thought her young children had made a mess. Then she noticed that something had gnawed on the wooden spoons in her kitchen drawer.


The second time, her 18-year-old son flipped up the lid on the same toilet, let out a scream and came bounding up the stairs.

"Did you close the lid?" Roberts asked.
Nope.

"It took several days to trap that one," Roberts said last week. "It's been very disgusting."

Since that last invasion two years ago, Roberts has installed a baffle that allows the toilet to flush but won't let in another adventurous rat.

Most people regard rats as a big-city problem, but the large rodents turn up by the hundreds in Cuyahoga County suburbs.

Rats especially turn up in the inner-ring communities where high-density housing and parklike yards provide a bountiful food supply.

The number of rat complaints in Cleveland suburbs climbed about 6 percent from 2002 to 2003, according to Cuyahoga County Board of Health records.

County health officials say it's unclear why rat complaints rise or fall. They have begun using computerized mapping to track reports of rats in Cleveland Heights, one of the areas with the most complaints.

Rats climbing up through toilets are relatively rare, but they routinely move into yards, burrowing beneath doghouses, sheds, or sidewalks or hiding out in woodpiles. And young rats in search of new territory sometimes climb through dryer vents. They can squeeze through openings as small as a dime.

"The affluence of the neighborhood doesn't seem to make much difference in whether or not you have rats," said Bill Kern, a University of Florida professor who studies rats and other urban pests. "If the food is available, they'll be there."

Cuyahoga County health officials said birdseed and pet food are to blame for most rat problems, but some suburbanites suspect sewer projects drove rats into their neighborhoods.

Lakewood expanded its baiting program this year, routinely placing poison beneath manhole covers, and focusing on areas where major road and sewer work is about to begin.

"If you're redoing a street, you can be disrupting habitat," said Lakewood Human Services Director Dottie Buckon, who oversees that city's health department.

Helen Profancik wonders whether it could have been the boring of her neighbor's clogged sewer line that led to a rat coming up through her Parma basement last year.

Profancik discovered the problem when she returned from church on a Sunday morning, looking forward to eating one of the bananas she had left in a bowl on the counter. A full third of one banana was gone gnawed away, peel and all. At first she thought she had mice and bought some d-Con poison.

A few days later, she found a rat on the floor of a spare bedroom, apparently sick from the poison but not yet dead.
A county inspector came and baited the sewer lines near her house, and she now places old laundry detergent bottles, filled with water, on the lid of her basement toilet and over a shower drain. Her son covered the sunken drain for her laundry tub with pointy wire.

"It took me six months before I could really rest in my house," Profancik said.
Janice Lynch said she discovered a rat problem outside her home on Hampstead Avenue last year, when her daughter stepped into a hole while putting up Christmas lights. The hole was created by the collapse of two tunnels leading toward the foundation.

Lynch believes the rats dug through the clay-block basement wall and set up a home in ceiling tiles above a basement bathroom and below the kitchen. The rats ate from her dog's bowl and drank from a basement shower.

They placed poisoned bait and eventually found six dead rats. She checked to see if her neighbors had a problem.

"Nobody did," she said. "Of course, nobody's going to own up to it because people will think you have a dirty house. I don't. I have a clean house. It's a little messy because of the kids, but it's clean."
Alan Sironen, curator of mammals at the Cleveland Metroparks Zoo, said rats invade homes and yards for a simple reason.

"They're looking for a nice place to raise their family plenty to eat and nobody bothering them," he said.
If they settle in, Sironen said, they multiply quickly.

Females have five to seven litters per year, with two to 12 pups per litter. They become sexually mature after three months, so the descendents of a single female could number in the hundreds in a year.

"If not controlled, there can be real problems," Sironen said.

Jeff Hanchar, a county inspector who investigates rat complaints in Cleveland Heights and University Heights, said eliminating food sources most often birdseed and debris, and storing wood on racks away from buildings are the best ways to keep rats at bay.

"Once you eliminate that food source, they're gone," Hanchar said.

That's probably not entirely reassuring to Donna Waldron, whose first and only encounter with a rat came one morning last fall in her clean colonial on Bradford Road in Cleveland Heights. She woke to the sound of dripping water.

When she went into the second-floor bathroom to investigate, she found a large rat probably 8 inches, not including the tail flopping around in the toilet bowl. She ran out of the room and slammed the door. The rat eventually drowned. She let her husband dispose of the carcass when he got home from work.

"Otherwise, I don't think he would have believed me," Waldron said.

She said an inspector baited the sewer in front of her house.

Still, she always makes sure the toilet lid is down. And each night before going to bed, she makes sure the bathroom door is closed.