PEST CONTROL
TCHC finally gets serious about tackling bedbug problem in its residences,
There was a community meeting about bedbugs and other pests in a community housing building at Brimley and Kingston Rds.
I found myself sitting next to a woman named Daphne. She was smartly turned out in a straw fedora, a hot pink hoodie and a billowing purple skirt. I asked her if she had bedbugs in her apartment.
She laughed. “I don’t have them. They don’t bother me. Cockroach bother me.” What has TCHC been doing? “They fumigate sometime.” Sometime, as you can guess, isn’t good enough. Just then, one of Daphne’s neighbours came over and said, “We should make up a dance, kick up our heels — the bedbug stomp.” Ha, ha, we said. It’s not funny. Some of Daphne’s neighbours have thrown out furniture and mattresses, others won’t have their families over to visit, still others are reluctant to visit friends, and so on, for fear of getting or spreading pests.
A big meeting; more than 80 people in attendance.
Over in one corner, someone had organized a little show-and-tell: glue traps thick with the tiniest cockroaches I have ever seen, and a small jar of bedbugs hungry for blood. Brr. There is good news: TCHC has a very sharp fellow in charge of pest control. He took the lead during the meeting. He said that TCHC is rolling out a cuttingedge plan to do whole-building treatments for pests.
He said — and he was interrupted by warm and generous applause, something I’m not used to at TCHC meetings — “We’re going to look at everything, top to bottom. For the next three months, we’ll be here quite a bit. We’ll issue you a survey. I want to know the good, the bad. I need to know the level of support you require. It’s confidential. It won’t be shared.
“On May 5, we’re going to start. We’ll look at everything — garbage chutes, closets, beds. We’ll look at the resources you need and come up with some solutions.” This, kids, is serious news. He said, “Pest companies used to come two times and be gone — we’re going to hold them accountable. They’ll come once, and they’ll come 14 days later, and 14 days after that; they’ll look through each entire unit.”
Fourteen days, as you know, is the incubation period for a bedbug egg; as you also know, sprays do not kill eggs.
Someone asked a key question — what happens if a tenant refuses to let anyone in? He said, “I’ll get the file. We’ll take legal action if we have to.” This is news.
An older man stood up carefully and said, “When someone dies, (TCHC building staff ) put the furniture out back. The body smell — people don’t care, they take the furniture in.” Which means the bugs come back in with the furniture. The TCHC man said, with some humility, “We’ll be more strict.”
We are overdue for such strictness; there is supposed to be a protocol in place for the disposal of buggy furniture, and it should have been in place five or six years ago. I’d say better late than never, but that’s not true; vigilance would have been better sooner.
The TCHC man said, “We’ll take precautions so that you don’t get other people’s problems.” More applause. I was curious — if you start at the top of a building and work your way down, aren’t you simply driving bedbugs and roaches into the apartments below? The TCHC man said they’d be working in staggered stages, from the 11th floor to the 9th, and then from the 10th to the 8th, or some such similar pattern; apparently, it works.
Someone else asked about the usefulness of the sprays people buy at the hardware store.
The TCHC man said that pyrethrin, the active ingredient in those hardware store sprays, is delivered at a concentration of .05 per cent, whereas the concentration in commercial bed bug spray is 5 per cent — in effect, he said, if you apply the spray at the lower concentration, all you’re doing is helping bedbugs become resistant to the spray. As they did with DDT. God help us all. Finally, he was asked about the use of steamers to kill bugs on furniture and mattresses. He said steaming was an art — if you don’t do it right, you aren’t killing eggs, you’re just helping them incubate at a quicker rate. He left the meeting a hero. I’ll keep you posted. Joe Fiorito appears Monday, Wednesday and Friday. jfiorito@thestar.ca