The Pied Pipers of Providence

Rat patrols battle a rodent problem that clawed its way into becoming an election issue

by Paul Kandarian

Paul Aguiar gets paid to think like a rat.

Aguiar, a supervisor with pest control company Griggs & Browne (they of the annoying yet catchy rhyme "Without Griggs & Browne, the whole town would fall down"), is a rat tracker, a rodent killer, the guy people call while they grimace on the phone about something running around in the walls.

Rats. Four legs, furry bodies, and, when you think about it, cute little faces. But there's nothing cute about finding mounds of rat crap in your hallway or chew holes that look as though a very small great white shark has been gnawing its way into your home.

"Rats are pretty amazing," Aguiar says, doing his rat thing by looking into tiny holes in the outside walls of a house on Wood Street in Providence. "They'll live anywhere, even in snowbanks in the winter. And they can follow a water line from the street into your house. Very smart animals."

So smart, in fact, that "when they come on a new food source, the stronger rats will make the weaker ones eat it first, in case it's been poisoned," says Tom Foley, an inspector with the city's Environmental Enforcement Division. "They're not a stupid animal."

Stupid, no. Icky, well, yes. Even though rats have some of the same grooming habits as the squeaky-clean feline species (they lick and wash themselves regularly, just like cats), rats do hang out in garbage and love to eat, quite literally, shit.

"Oh, you find a place with a lot of pigeons and pigeon crap," Foley says, "[and] you'll find a lot of rats. They love feces, dog feces, too."

As a result, rats have the bad rap. They are not huge, hulking, teeth-baring carnivores ready to strip your flesh from your bones if you walk into an alley late at night. They are not the ravenous beasts that the '70s schlock movies Willard and Ben made them out to be. They are not overtaking Providence, as a City Council pre-election rat scare newspaper story a few weeks back might have made people think.

They are just little furry creatures doing their job -- surviving -- as guys like Aguiar do his: Slaying them.

"Look at that mark on the wall there, the black mark," Aguiar says. "Rats have oily fur, and you can see where they rubbed up against the wall as they made their way into this house. You have to look for stuff like that, at piles of debris in yards, abandoned garages, to see where the rats live."

He shrugs. "I guess you have to think like rat."

Providence's Environmental Enforcement Division is located in an ugly squat of a brick building on Allens Avenue, in the Department of Public Works headquarters. The wide-open office looks like

a World War II meeting room -- gray desks, gray filing cabinets, gray linoleum, even a big gray fan to keep air circulating that is too hot for comfort, summer or winter. Gray all around. Just like rats.

"Norway rats, that's all there are in New England, little gray ones," Foley says, sitting at his (gray) desk, talking about his job, most of which is enforcing trash laws to keep the rats away.

He discounts the idea (as do most rat experts) that Providence is being overtaken by rats, despite what the people over in Ward 7 were saying in the Providence Journal-Bulletin's pre-election rat story.

"Rats can only get so big," Foley says, holding his hands up a foot apart, maybe a little less. "They just look bigger when you see one you don't want to see."

So much for the rumors about rats as big as small dogs. And forget attack rats.

"I've never heard of a rat attacking a human," says Foley, 49, who has been on the job nine years. "Unless you corner them. They'll bite then, but who wants to corner a rat?"

Foley thinks about it for a second, then mentions that occasionally rats will come up in the drains of a house, if the street is flooded.

"I've heard of cases where people have been bitten on the ass," Foley says, cringing at the thought of what could be mere urban legend. "Right up through the toilet. Don't know if it's true, but that's what I've heard."

Lisa E. Powers, coordinator of the Environmental Enforcement Division and Foley's boss, agrees that while rats are "a very important problem," they are "not a huge one, not at all.

"This had become a major urban issue in the [Ward 7 City Council] primary and the election, but the problem is not worse," she says. "It's just that people are more aware of it."

Powers says that in the last couple of years Mayor Vincent A. Cianci Jr. decided to step up the enforcement efforts of her department. And today, EED fines range from $25 for improper trash storage to $500 for illegal dumping. (Foley actually played sleuth once and tracked a violator down through a shoe store receipt in a bag he found dumped in the middle of the street.)

"We have a new environmental court now, too," Powers says. "In the old court, rats weren't a high priority. In this one, we have one day a week with Judge Frank Caprio, who hears only environmental cases."

Before, 25 people a week would show up for environmental cases, says Powers. But now, in Caprio's court, "we get a couple hundred, and we've only lost a couple of cases."

Foley and the division's other inspectors also regularly attend seminars on a variety of environmental issues, including how to be a better rat spotter. As a result, Foley pretty much has the rat rap down.

"A rat needs three things to survive -- food, shelter, water," he says. "You cut one or all of those off, the rats will leave the area. Rats generally stay within 180 feet of their food supply."

Which means your house, if there is a good supply of rat chow nearby, no matter if it's yours or your neighbor's. If you live clean but next to a slob with piles of crap in his back yard, well, su rats es tu rats.

Patricia Barkett's house is clean, really clean. She washes down the sidewalk in front of her Eastwood Avenue home every night in the summer -- with bleach and water -- just to keep the varmints away. She also carefully covers her trash cans, which officials say is key to keeping rats away.

Barkett will even wash around the foundation of her house with ammonia and bleach to stem the tide of rising rats. And still they come. Not to her house -- a rat would have to be nuts to go near a house so blatantly antiseptic -- but all around her.

"You should see it on trash night, when people put their bags on the sidewalk," she says from the front door of her home, her barefoot grandson poking his curious head out and confirming what his grandma is saying. "And across the street? Infested, infested with rats."

Foley looks at the houses across the street, and sure enough, there are sure-fire signs all around. In the base of a five-foot-high cement retaining wall in front of the triple-deckers, there are holes that serve as a rat's entrance ramp.

Taking me on a tour of this section of the city near the Armory District, Foley sees a chewed-open trash bag lying on Heath Street.

"This area's a problem child," he says.

It's near Eastwood, another problem child. Indeed, according to Barkett, during this past summer, a huge box of garbage sat on the street for weeks, and nobody picked it up. It was a rat buffet, she says, until Powers came by and finally had it removed.

"They picked it up in a forklift, and

you shoulda seen those rats scatter," she says. "The guy in the truck is yelling, `RATS!! RATS!!' and the rats are running all over."

Barkett has been in her home 31 years, she says. A lot of her neighbors are clean; a lot aren't. The dirty ones help attract the rodents that are a blight to all.

"That's the key," says Foley, pointing to Barkett's neatly arranged trash barrels, properly capped, behind her chain-link fence. "Most of the problem is people just throwing trash bags on the sidewalk" -- something that Cianci calls "an outdoor restaurant to a rat."

Foley says the division's four inspectors patrol in sectors, looking for illegal dumping that is in violation of the city's laws. Over on Fillmore Street and Douglas Avenue is a "clean" lot, he says, meaning no brush and not a lot of crap. No rat tracks. No holes. Clean. Across the street, though, is an overgrown lot with a pit bull nearby, Foley says. Rats love it.

You have to give Foley credit. The man knows his lots. Finding one on June Street, a huge one a block long that has been recently paved over, he says, "Thank God. We used to get a call a week on that one."

At Gaspee and Francis streets, where the Providence Place Mall will sprawl, rats also have been spotted. "There's a lot of construction going on in the Smith Hill area, and when you move around that much dirt, you're bound to disturb some creatures," says Foley. "And it's not just rats. We see a lot of opossums, skunks . . . A lot of people mistake skunks for rats."

Foley says the strangest rat occurrence he witnessed was a few years ago, when a bunch of rats, apparently in the pre-death throes of poisoning, were seen dancing in the street near City Hall in the middle of the day. (Rats usually come out only at night. )

I tell Foley that it must have been an election year and that they were just some politicians campaigning. He laughs. Rat trackers are not without a sense of humor, after all.

"We don't get involved in politics," Foley says, smiling.

At Griggs & Browne, Aguiar is a champion rat killer. If pushed on the subject, he'll say that in his six years on the job, he has nailed maybe 500 rats overall. The back of his truck looks like a Dr. Kevorkian lunch wagon, with all manner of poisons, baits, and lethal dust designed to kill the pests that pester the public.

"We bait inside the rat's burrows, shove paper in the hole to keep it in, then pack dirt around the hole to keep it from coming out," Aguiar says, doing just that at the Wood Street house.

The worst infestation he has seen, he says, was at a house in Olneyville, where they pulled about three-dozen rats out.

"One time, I was at a house and a rat walked right by me, almost over my feet," he says. "I was trying to figure out where they were getting in, so I stood perfectly still and watched where it went. Thank you very much, rat."

Aguiar says that at other times, he has been peering into the dark of a rat hole -- and has seen the glow of beady eyes peering back at him.

Tony DeJesus, director of training and public relations for New England Pest Control (the Big Blue Bug people), recalls a house from which they took 17 rats that had been living in an underground crawl space, nesting and breeding.

"They were stealing the dog's food," DeJesus says. "The woman thought her dog was sick, because it was losing weight. The rats were eating [its food]. We took four or five pounds of dog food out of the crawlspace."

DeJesus says that Kennedy Park downtown is a problem area because of people feeding the pigeons, which, in turn, crap and feed the rats. Debris is a problem as well, he says, no matter how small. Indeed, even the grease on a hamburger wrapper is enough to draw out rats.

As to the myth of huge rats standing on their hind legs and menacing the good folks of the city, DeJesus doesn't buy it. "The biggest rat ever caught was a little less than three pounds," he says. "They're usually just about a pound. When they're scared, they puff out their fur and look bigger."

The bottom line in rat control is simple, he says: Don't give them a food source. Even at that, rats will prevail somewhere.

"Rats are never going to go away," Powers says. "You just don't entice them to stay."

Foley takes the evolutionary tack.

"Rats have been around since day one," he says, "and they've survived better than man has."