Rat back atcha!
Annual rodent influx met by new weapon: smoke machine
Oh, rats.
It’s that time of the year again, with the weather warming up and the local representatives of the Norwegian rat population emerging from their burrows to spawn a deluge of 311 reports to Boston and then council hearings about how to do battle with this scourge. But this year the city comes armed with a new weapon: the smoke machine.
It’s no longer just to make your Halloween decorations look spooky — this anti-rodent device basically just hits the rats with a wave of carbon monoxide, quickly suffocating them.
“We think it’s going to be very successful,” Mike Mackan, who’s over seeing pest-control measures for the city, told the Herald on Wednesday.
The new machine’s called the Burrow RX Smoking Machine, and goes for about $2,600 a pop. The city has two of the devices — which the website also refers to as “Gopher X Extermination Machine” — and just started using them over the past couple of months.
The City Council, as it does every year, introduced a hearing order to talk about pest control, a topic as perennial come April or so as second-guessing the Sox’ starting rotation. This year’s iteration of the rat inquest was introduced on Wednesday by Council President Ed Flynn and Councilors Liz Breadon and Erin Murphy, with Councilors Kenzie Bok, Michael Flaherty, Kendra Lara and Julia Mejia all chiming in to talk at the weekly council meeting.
“It’s a quality-of-life concern for me and for residents in the city,” said Flynn, the lead sponsor. He said he’d look to hold hearings periodically to see how the war on rats was going, and that the city should budget more money to anti-rat efforts.
Breadon noted that she represents a neighborhood with “the dubious honor of being named ‘Allston Rat City,’ ” and said it seems that “absentee landlords” and changes in trash collection could be contributing to the problem.
Murphy said she gets calls from “every neighborhood in the city.”
Mejia added that the city should “lean into developers” to further mitigate how construction displaces the rats onto the streets.
The Norwegian rat, also known as the brown rat or, per Wikipedia, the “common rat,” “street rat,” or “sewer rat,” is the predominant rodent trundling around the streets of Boston, a common sight in many of the city’s neighborhoods. Mackan said they need very little to sustain themselves, and said people can try to head off rat problems by picking up dog poop, not having any standing water outside and tightly securing their trash.
Flaherty brought up how the city used to be able to use dry ice to smother the rats in their burrows quite effectively, but then some rules changed requiring a more elaborate process. He said the council should have Inspectional Services and the fire department in to look at how the city can again “utilize this very useful tool to combat rodent infestation.”