Horror stories about rats falling from the ceiling, getting into bedrooms, and leaving piles of feces are also told
Last week, Orleans East-Cumberland Coun. Matthew Luloff told a scary story about a retired man who had to fight off a horde of rats at a committee meeting.
“He caught 78 rats with his own rat trap in his backyard last year,” Luloff said. “That’s disgusting.”
The person who lives in Luloff is not alone. As of the end of May in 2023, residents of Ottawa had filed 278 complaints with the city about rats inside or outside their homes. That’s more than the 250 from the same time last year.
As a response, the city has brought back a working group to coordinate its response to infestations. It also points out its current efforts to inspect, maintain parks, and educate people. But people who have to fight off pests often feel like they are on their own.
Here are a few of the stories they told.
“They really have fallen through the ceiling.
It started this winter for Vicky Goyette. A friend of hers who lives in the basement could hear something moving in the walls. Then rats began to fall from the ceiling.
It kept him up at night.
“He was not sleeping.He said that they were arguing.”He could hear the screeching sounds they were making as they ran through the ceilings,” she says.
“We started setting up traps, and then they kept coming. But when spring came, things got really bad.”
Goyette, who lives in Orléans, thinks she alone caught about 20 rats. Then she called a professional, who killed at least 20 to 40 more and sealed up her house with caulk and wire mesh.
She said it has cost her about $6,000, and that doesn’t even count the damage to her property. She will have to fix the ceiling in the basement and a hole that leads up to her kitchen. The rats chewed through the hose to her dishwasher, so she will also have to fix the hole. Even the wires in her shed were broken, cutting off the electricity.
She said, “Of course, the droppings were the other big thing.””There was a lot in the kitchen sink. It had to be cleaned every day.”
Every time she opened a cabinet, she was afraid that a rat would be staring back at her.
Goyette hasn’t seen a rat in about two weeks, so she’s glad that her exterminator seems to have done a good job, at least for now. But her neighbors have told her that they are now having rat problems, so she thinks the rats have just moved on to a new place to live.
‘It’s just awful
Kimberley Hoare remembers the noises the rat made in her bedroom, which were like a bad dream.
“He was a big guy,” she said.
She felt so uneasy when he was around that she slept on her couch for two weeks.
“I did catch him in the end,” she said.”He was in the drawer of my dressing table. I set up a trap and got him in the end.”
Hoare has been paying close attention to what her Kanata home catches. She now has 48 rats and is still counting.
Also, the bills keep coming in.She thinks rats are to blame for a water leak in her ceiling because they chewed a hole in a plastic pipe. Fixing that cost her $250. She will have to fix her ceiling and get rid of the rat urine and poop-stained carpeting.
She paid $1,500 to hire a pest control company.The rats are still there, though.
“They are digging tunnels in my basement insulation,” she said.”I actually can watch them.”
It’s a hopeless cause. She said, “The alpha male has a harem of females.” Every eight weeks or so, each of these females gives birth to a new litter.
She hates having to go down to her basement to do laundry or check the rat traps. She said, “I wear two masks because of the poop and urine down there.””It’s just awful,” he said. I’m too scared to go there.”
Hoare hasn’t had a good time trying to get the city to do something. She thinks a neighbor who throws peanuts and seeds around is luring the rats. Hoare says that bylaw didn’t do anything more than give a warning.
She said, “It looks like they can’t do anything.”
She wants the city to be stricter about the rules about property.
“They took over my yard pretty much
Communities on the north side of the river are also being overrun by rats, and Terry Caunter’s Gatineau neighborhood could be the starting point.
He lives near the Champlain Bridge in Manoir des Trembles. He said that the problem started around the start of the pandemic. Caunter and his neighbors worked together to catch the rats that were running through their yards, and then they called an exterminator to help.
He said that when they worked together, they caught about 200 rats.But it became clear quickly that their efforts were for nothing.
“We stopped. He said, “It just didn’t seem worth it because no matter how many you catch, they make more so quickly.”
“They are very productive.”
Caunter said that a rusty trash can from a condo complex behind his house was to blame. He called his local council member, who was able to convince the condo to get a new one. But it didn’t do much good.
“Rats don’t care,” he told her.”They are digging. They are amazing engineers.
Now, Caunter sees one or two rats every day. They’ve dug tunnels, which has made his yard what he calls “Grand Central Station” for their network of transportation.
They went underneath his shed. Last spring, Caunter took it apart and spent around $2,000 trying to make it rat-proof by digging a trench, filling it with gravel, and putting up chicken wire. But the rats dug down about 3 feet to get away from his defenses.
Caunter wants the City of Gatineau to start a coordinated campaign to get rid of the rats, which would include better enforcement of property standards.
He said, “It really hurts the quality of life for everyone in the neighborhood.”
“Something should be done by the city.
People from all over the city called CBC to talk about rat problems.
Clarence Furtado in Centretown noticed that rats had eaten holes in his trash cans. Inside his house, he found droppings. A person who gets rid of pests said they were from rats. He thought it was “shocking.” He is afraid that a rat will bite him or give him a disease.
He said, “I think the city needs to be more involved.” “Don’t just leave the homeowner to figure it out on their own.”
He suggested picking up trash once a week as a way to stop rats from getting food.
Johanna Hove moved into Heron Park in March, and the first week she was there, she saw a rat run across her back deck.She looked at a community Facebook group and found out that she wasn’t the only one dealing with pests. Rat sightings were being talked about everywhere.
She said, “There needs to be some kind of plan, because I don’t think the city is doing anything right now.””As far as I can tell, the solution is just to educate the public, but I don’t think that’s enough.”
Back in Orléans, Pierre Page has seen about six or seven rats on his property this year. He said that has never been a problem in the 35 years he has lived there and that the LRT construction in the area might be to blame.
“These rats are multiplying like crazy,” said Page, who used to work as a city clerk in Ottawa.
“I got a letter from bylaw saying there was no program, they couldn’t do anything, and I was on my own.”
It made him “a little angry,” because he thinks the city should do something. He’s not yet impressed by the fact that they’ve put together a group to deal with the infestations. He said that it was “posturing.”
He said, “I’ll feel better when I see that they do something about the problem.”
In a statement, the city said that there have been more complaints about rats in the past few years. It said that it is currently dealing with them through education, park maintenance, some baiting on city property, property standards, and inspections of food service.
It said that the new rat mitigation working group will let staff “look for new ways to deal with the problem in Ottawa.” They can do this by studying how other places handle rats and by sharing information and working together.
The city said that its staff knows how important rat complaints are and that a working group will look at different parts of the city to learn more about the problem.
The statement also said that construction can make rats move around and look for new places to get food, water, and shelter, especially in homes.