FAMILY LEFT DEALING WITH A RAT NIGHTMARE
AFATHER-OF-FOUR says he is pleading with his local council for help as his life has been a complete nightmare since rats infested the attic of his local authority home 16 years ago.
Darren Langabeer, from Llanelli, said the problem first started when the family noticed rats were eating food in their kitchen. Since then, the 49-year-old said he had made several complaints to Carmarthenshire Council and other authorities but the problem still wasn’t resolved.
A Carmarthenshire Council executive board member said they were working with the tenant to try to resolve his problems.
But Darren said that for the past 10 weeks he’d had no electricity upstairs due to the rats chewing through cables in the attic and the family had been forced to use their phone torches to be able to move around the house.
Darren said he and his wife both worked and took pride in their home, but that it was being ruined by rodents.
He said: “They’ve sent people with bait and we’ve had to move out because they’ve previously killed rats and they’ve gone under the floor boards and the stench is absolutely horrendous to be honest. The council don’t seem to care because they don’t live here.”
Darren works for Calsonic Kansei in Llanelli and his wife works for the NHS in Prince Phillip Hospital and the rats keep the couple awake in the night, when they can hear them chewing through the wood in the attic.
Darren’s 14-year-old, 15-yearold and 13-month-old daughters live in the property and have had to live with the problem their whole lives.
“They get scared because they think people are in the house because they can hear the rats in the attic. We can’t sleep, the girls convince themselves that the rats are under the beds and it does fear the girls but it’s become second nature to them hearing the horrible creatures running around the house. If you want to go into the attic, there’s a large amount of rat droppings that are dropping on the floor and I’ve got a child here.”
Darren says he has been reporting issues to Carmarthenshire County Council for 16 years but he feels that they are brushing the problem under the carpet. He says 58 rats have been previously removed from the property and on one occasion the rats had eaten through the fire alarms, smoke alarms and carbon monoxide alarms.
He said the council had told him in the past that the rats were at the property due to a compost bin and wood that Darren had in his rear garden for two and a half years. The wood was removed by the council but he said the problem was still there.
Darren claimed drains had not been capped off so the rats we re able to come in.
The council have offered temporary lighting due to the rats chewing the cables, according to Darren, but he said he didn’t understand why they couldn’t come and just fix the lighting as he was renting the property, which he estimated had cost him £85,000 so far. He said: “We’ve had the electrics done on numerous occasions over the 16 years and it’s just an ongoing problem and they don’t seem to do anything.
“I’ve tried getting through to environmental health and public health but I just can’t get through. I’m just transferred to different people and have to explain the whole story again and it’s annoying. It’s just been a complete nightmare to be honest and I tried to get through to them and they don’t seem to care, they don’t listen to us.”
The council’s executive board member for public protection, Cllr Philip Hughes, said: “We are working with the tenant to resolve pest issues within the property. We have carried out a full pest survey, cleared debris from the affected area and have performed a full drainage system survey in order to identify the cause. Work is ongoing to resolve the issue, with housing and environmental health officers working to identify and deal with the root cause.”