The Rat Patrol

If you find a rat in your toilet, try to remain calm, counsels Don Pace. He is one of two workers who kill rats in Seattle's sewers, and he says the first thing you should do if a rat shows up in your toilet is shut the lid. "They can jump out," he says. Next, with the lid closed, take a bottle of dishwashing soap and squirt it into the bowl by using the opening between the seat and the rim of the toilet. The dishwashing soap makes the bowl and the pipe below it slippery, making it hard for the rat to get any traction. Then flush the toilet. Usually the rat goes down and doesn't come back.

When Pace began working at Public Health–Seattle & King County, the agency actually responded to homes where rats found their way in through the pipes. On one of his first days on the job, Pace was responding to such a call when he encountered the biggest rat he has ever seen. "This lady was panic stricken," recalls Pace. The rat's "hands were underneath the lid, holding on to the rim," he says. That foiled the normal flushing method. Pace was trying to figure out how to kill the rat in the bowl without letting the animal get out. Armed with a toilet plunger, he laid a towel over the bowl and prepared to plunge down. He knew he had only one shot at the rat. Neither hunter nor hunted could see the other because of the towel between them. Pace plunged down. He missed. The rat jumped out of the bowl. The homeowner screamed and slammed the door to the bathroom shut. Says Pace, "Now I'm trapped in the bathroom with a giant rat. I'm trying to hit him with the plunger or stomp on him." Pace says rats make an odd noise when you are trying to crush them under your boot. "They do make a high squeal, like, 'Don't step on me!'" he says. Eventually, Pace squished the rat, but it wasn't pretty. "I won," he says, "but I was shaking when I came out of the bathroom."

Nowadays, such an event elicits elaborate poison control of nearby sewers but no actual help with the intruder. There were about 65 calls in Seattle last year to Public Health–Seattle & King County about rats in toilets. Public Health only deals with rat-in-the-toilet complaints within the city, where the expense of setting out poison is covered by Seattle Public Utilities. If you live in the suburbs or unincorporated King County, refer to the first paragraph of this story and hope for the best.

If Seattle has a self-image of a clean city free of the pests found in teeming metropolises like New York, it's wrong. Rats live all over, in neighborhoods rich or poor, dense or suburban, new or old. Says David Williams, a health and environmental investigator with the Environmental Health Services Division of Public Health–Seattle & King County: "You can find rats anywhere. You don't have to look too hard."

Rats come up in toilets in Blue Ridge. They run along telephone wires in Magnolia. Rats live in abandoned houses in Laurelhurst, scurry through the sewers on Beacon Hill. Rats overran Pacific Place mall three days before it opened. (Williams says the manager called him. "He said, 'We just saw a rat running across the front of Tiffany.' I said, 'Was it wearing a tennis bracelet?' The phone got cold in my hands.") Rats eat the garbage accumulated by human "hoarders" in Wallingford, the Rainier Valley, and Ballard—those people who can't bear to throw anything away.

There is no census of rats in Seattle and King County, so we don't know how many there are, but there are certainly thousands upon thousands. Says Williams, "It might be several million."

Williams and colleagues Teri Barclay, Carole Coombs, David Christensen, Mike Reed, and Pace are the members of King County's Rat Patrol—the vital frontline workers who stand between us and rodent infestation. Some work to help educate the public about how to keep the rat population at reasonable levels throughout the county. Others kill the rats in Seattle sewers. But as Williams says, "You can't bring in enough poison to kill them all." People need to keep the rat population down by limiting the rodents' food supply. The chief culprits are bird feeders, pet food, and garbage. When it comes to rats, ignorance is dangerous—for your health and your property. Come along. The Rat Patrol tells you what you need to know.

The outwardly normal appearance of the offices of the Environmental Health Services Division of Public Health–Seattle & King County is deceptive. On the seventh floor of the Wells Fargo Building, there is nothing, at first, in a warren of cubicles to suggest that this is anything other than normal class-A office space.

Then you meet Bentley.

Barclay, a thin, middle-aged woman who dresses with casual elegance, carries Bentley, an enormous stuffed Norway rat, as though he is the most ordinary mascot in the world. The creature is repulsive, easily 20 inches from nose to tail, with a tawny brown coat, beady little eyes, sharp claws, and a great, fat belly. "He was well fed. He was old," says Barclay with real affection.