Rats, a boat and a $2,700 repair bill
John Weller hoped he was wrong, that rats hadn’t returned to his north Niagara Falls neighbourhood.
Then he pulled the cover off his boat.
“I started to roll it up, and I saw the foam and I thought, well that’s strange … I flipped it up and I laughed, to be honest with you.
“I couldn’t believe that something had torn up the boat like that. And then shock comes into it, when it suddenly dawns on me it could have been rats.”
Now, he’s without a boat for the summer and facing a $2,700 repair bill. Rats chewed up all the foam seats on his six-seater 15foot Bowrider, ate through the wood and vinyl and made mincemeat of the firewall and padding on the inside walls.
“Luckily they did not chew the wiring,” said Weller, who lives on Willinger Street. “If they had, I think they definitely would have totalled the boat.”
Niagara Falls is enduring the same rat problem many other areas of Ontario are going through this year.
Last year all across Niagara, the public health department recorded 71 rat sightings in residential neighbourhoods.
Already this year there are 108 reports and “anecdotaly, we probably get more calls from Niagara Falls than the other municipalities,” said Peter Jekel, manager of environmental health for Niagara’s public health department.
“It’s not just Niagara, I hear it from colleagues from all across Ontario who are reporting the same issues.”
It’s true — earlier this year, Orkin Pest Control ranked Ontario’s “rattiest” cities, based on the number of rat and mice treatments the company applied during 2017.
Niagara Falls was 21 rattiest in the province, and St. Catharines was 22nd. No other Niagara municipalities made the list, but Hamilton was fifth and Toronto was the worst in Ontario.
In Niagara Falls, the city received 185 rat complaints in 2017, compared to 135 the year before.
That’s likely due in part to all the residential and commercial construction going on, Jekel said.
Niagara Falls led the region in housing construction last year, with 537 new starts. Building in the tourism areas has also been active, including work on the $140-million, 5,000-seat casino theatre.
Milder winters might also have something to do with it, but mostly public health officials can’t say for sure why there are more rat sightings across the province,
Jekel said.
Reports of a rat biting a human are rare – in the range of once a year, he said. When public health gets a report of rats sighted in a neighbourhood, Jekel said they do a “scope” of the area by distributing information there on ways to adapt properties so they don’t attract rats — eliminate fruit trees and vegetable gardens, as well as bird feeders, secure compost bins and don’t put out curbside trash for collection too early.
On a case-by-case basis, Niagara Falls city crews will bait sewers with poison to control the rat population.
The city also has a residential program to rebate half a homeowner’s extermination bill up to $200. This year St. Catharines adopted a similar program, while Welland is looking at adding one next year.
“That’s generally how we do things, and in my opinion it’s been working very well,” said Gerald Spencer, manager of municipal enforcement services for Niagara Falls.
The Willinger Street neighbourhood where Weller lives doesn’t look like one where rats might rear their ugly heads — the properties are generally kept clean and there’s no ongoing construction or demolition in the area.
But there are sewers. And, said Spencer, “rats, they do travel … development probably displaces them.”
Earlier this year, another resident came to Niagara Falls city council to complain that housing construction at the old Optimist Park on Morrison Street displaced rats and sent them into his neighbourhood.
“We never had a rat problem in our neighbourhood,” John Chase told councillors. “It is very embarrassing for me to come down and stand here on camera and talk about rats in my property and in my neighbourhood.”
St. Catharines faced a similar problem two years ago when the old General Motors plant on Ontario Street was demolished. Neighbours reported seeing rats on their properties.
Weller believes the vermin in his neighbourhood are sewer rats. He first saw them three years ago, but after he spotted city workers baiting the sewers, the problem seemed to disappear. Until now.
“The first indication we had this past winter … my wife, Carol, came out to barbecue. She opened the barbecue lid and she thought she saw something moving in the barbecue,” he said.
“She clicked the starter again and what she’s pretty sure was a rat ran across her feet and took off.”
Later, he was cutting the grass beside his house when he nearly ran over a rat with his lawnmower.
“I asked my neighbour if he’d seen rats,” Weller said. “He said, ‘we have seen them running across the ledge of our window, while we’re in our family room.’”
Weller set some traps of his own, but didn’t catch anything.
“I was really upset when they destroyed my boat,” he said.
“I thought, that’s it, what else are they going to destroy? … once they’re in the area of your home, that’s when you’ve got to be really concerned.”