Williams says Shafran's and Cypress Cove both represent problems that he deals with on a daily basis. "It's representative of what I see," he says. Williams seems to have only one regret about his job—that he can't do more for each citizen that calls. "It would be great to spend more time at each site, but you can't. There are only three of us for all of King County."
Don Pace on poison patrol. "The thing about the sewers: There are no predators."
On July 21, Pace, the sewer-baiter, stands at the intersection of East Hamlin Street and Franklin Avenue East, in the Eastlake neighborhood. He is following up on a complaint of a rat in a toilet nearby. Parked next to him is his white van, full of the tools of his trade, with orange lights that flash on top. A big bear of a man with short gray hair and a closely cropped beard, Pace wears aviator glasses with lenses that darken or lighten in response to the light and is dressed in jeans, a short-sleeved red shirt, and thick black shoes. He is a natural storyteller, with 13 years of rat stories. He's worked for Public Health on and off since 1989. He used to do visits to homes that are themselves attractive to rats, like the trailer in Kent, but he prefers sewer work because, as Pace says, "When you respond to somebody who has had a rat in their toilet, they are always glad to see you."
Kevin P. Casey
Teri Barclay with Public Health mascot Bentley: "We bring him to meetings."
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Pace says rats don't mean to come up in your toilet. Rats find their way into homes' sewer pipes a couple of ways. They use sewer lines to travel from place to place and to feed—either on scraps of food waste (preferably) or feces (if necessary). Sometimes, rats follow the scent of food from the main sewer line to a side sewer and into the pipes of a home. While crawling up the pipes, they are following a scent, looking for food scraps at the bottom of your kitchen sink. Maybe they make a wrong turn and end up in your toilet bowl. The other way they enter a toilet is by following the scent of a broken pipe in the side sewer. They dig down through the yard to the pipe, then try to trace that food smell back to its source.
Unlike when he started in this business, Pace no longer goes into homes to kill rats in toilets. He calls the resident and says he will be out within a week to put poison down into the sewer to try to reduce the local rat population and limit the possibilities of more rodent appearances in the bowl. That's what has brought him to Eastlake on a hot, sunny day.
He takes a long steel hook out of his truck and adroitly puts it into one of the holes on the top of a sewer manhole. He pops the manhole out and pulls up a 13-foot string and notes with satisfaction that there is nothing on the end of it. That means that the rats have eaten the poison. He rebaits a small piece of copper wire on the end of the string with three blue, waxy rectangles. The active ingredient in the bait is Brodifacoum, which is the current poison of choice among rat killers. It is an anticoagulant that causes the rats to die from internal bleeding.
Pace pulls a huge, black 500,000-candlepower flashlight out of his van and shines it down into the sewer. There are many layers of brick below the street, six rusty rungs form a ladder on one side, and at the bottom there is a trough that the sewage water runs through. It smells like an outhouse. "I'm looking for droppings," says Pace. Black, shiny rat feces are signs of recent activity. Gray, dull ones mean no rats have defecated in the area lately. Pace walks a couple of blocks south and goes through the same routine. He baits the manholes that are upstream and downstream from the site of the rat-in-the-toilet complaint. "It relieves the fear. You know somebody is out there. It gives [people] the feeling that they are safe," says Pace.
When Pace is not responding to complaints, he is doing routine sewer baiting. He and his co-worker do 65 to 85 manholes a day. Block by block, neighborhood by neighborhood, they cover the entire city of Seattle in a two-year time period. Says Pace, "The thing about the sewers: There are no predators."
It's not certain how long the kind of poison Seattle currently employs will remain effective. Rats have become resistant to an earlier anticoagulant poison, Warfarin, and are developing immunity to Brodifacoum as well.
Rats have even survived nuclear bombs. As Sullivan recounts, there was a study of rats that were living on the Enewetack Atoll in the Marshall Islands during America's nuclear testing program. The study found "that the rats had survived the blast by staying deep down in their burrows, and that, upon investigating, the only abnormality . . . was a change in the structure of the rats' upper jaws, a change that did not seem to hinder the rat in any way."
As a pest control firm representative once told Sullivan, "The bad news is rodents are going to win this war against humans. The good news is there's a lot of business."
ghowland@seattleweekly.com
