Rodent Control in Williamsburg

Why does the sewer decide so much of this?

Because the network under these streets carries stormwater and sewage in the same pipes, it surcharges regularly, and a surcharging network moves animals.

The system draining Bushwick, Williamsburg and Greenpoint on the Brooklyn side into Newtown Creek is not compliant with the Clean Water Act. Combined sewer overflows occur roughly weekly, discharging on the order of a hundred million gallons, and as little as a tenth of an inch of rain can trigger an event. The creek itself was listed as a Superfund site in 2010 after more than a century of refining, chemical and smelting activity.

Most of that is an environmental story rather than a pest one. The pest-relevant part is narrow and concrete: a sewer network is a continuous, sheltered, food-bearing route running beneath an entire neighborhood, and Norway rats use it. When the network fills and then drains — which here happens most weeks of the year — the animals in it are pushed up and out, into whatever openings exist at the top of the system.

Those openings are almost always inside buildings rather than outside them.

Yard drains and area drains that discharge into the house drain rather than to a separate line.

Cellar floor drains whose trap seal has dried out. A floor drain that is not receiving water loses its water seal, and at that point it is an open pipe connecting a cellar floor to the sewer.

Disused connections. Every building here has been altered, converted or subdivided, and old drainage that was cut and abandoned rather than properly capped is common in the older stock.

Cracked or disconnected lines under the cellar slab, and missing cleanout covers.

This is the answer to the question owners ask most often in this neighborhood: how do rats get into a building with no opening anybody can find? They did not come in from outside. They came up.

The remedies are unglamorous and they outperform anything applied at street level. Cap or properly trap disused connections. Confirm that floor drains hold water rather than having dried out. Replace broken or missing cleanout covers. Get yard drainage to actually discharge rather than pond. None of that looks like pest control and all of it is the job.

For the method in general see rodent control; for the whole of this neighborhood’s stock, pest control in Williamsburg.

What does construction on the block do to a population?

It moves it without reducing it, and on these blocks that has been going on for twenty years.

Two rezonings reshaped the neighborhood. The 2005 waterfront plan covered roughly a hundred and eighty-four blocks and projected a net addition of about seven thousand four hundred dwellings across seventy-six development sites. A second rezoning in 2009 covered a hundred and seventy-five inland blocks that were almost entirely one zoning district, replacing that with contextual districts and eliminating as-of-right towers without height limits. The output most people notice is the buildings. The output that matters here is the ground: two decades of sites opening, running and closing in sequence.

Excavation is the most reliable way to move a rat population without reducing it. A burrow system is destroyed, the animals disperse to the nearest shelter that still has food and water, and the nearest shelter is a neighboring building’s yard, cellar or waste storage. NYC Health’s framing is that rats need food, water, shelter and safe ways to move around — construction removes the shelter and leaves the other three untouched.

That produces the single most common complaint in this neighborhood: a building with a stable, quiet history acquires a problem in a month when nothing changed inside it.

The practical conclusion is unwelcome and simple. You will not get the site next door to behave the way you would like, and arguing about it costs time that would be better spent on your own building line. What you can do is close your own boundary — cellar penetrations, service entries, door thresholds, drainage — before the next site opens rather than after. Work done in advance costs the same as work done in response, and it prevents an interior population instead of removing one.

There is a converse point worth using. A building that is itself being altered is a building where sealing is cheap, because the floors, chases and collars are already open. Boards and owners who write pest exclusion into their alteration agreements get most of this work done for the cost of specifying it.

What is the right scope for a three-family walk-up?

Finite, physical and mostly below the ground floor.

Small buildings are most of this neighborhood — well over four in ten residential properties are two-, three- and four-unit buildings — and the routes in them are the routes of any attached nineteenth-century structure.

The party wall. The floor joists of both attached buildings bear into the wall they share, and on nineteenth-century construction those bearing recesses were rarely closed. That leaves horizontal voids at every floor level linking the two buildings, which is how house mice cross between structures without ever going outdoors. It is also why pressure applied on one side of a party wall produces a complaint on the other a few weeks later.

The cellar line. Shallow cellars with soil contact, service entries, abandoned sleeves, the yard door, and the drainage described above. In the blocks near the water, groundwater is high and the cellar is wet by default.

The rear yard. Yards back onto one another across the block interior. Fences stop people. The interior functions as one habitat with soft ground to burrow in, planting for cover, and a food supply that only has to be dependable at one or two properties out of thirty.

Waste. The containerisation program reaches buildings of this size, and it is the one measure that acts on the food supply rather than on the animals. Which band and which date applies is worth confirming with DSNY, because the arrangements differ by unit count and the rollout is phased.

The order of work in an occupied building is fixed. Reduce first, because sealing a building that already holds an interior population removes the animals’ way out and they die inside masonry walls. Close in materials that cannot be bitten — mesh, hardware cloth, sheet metal, mortar, hydraulic cement. Correct the water while the wall is open. Verify with monitoring rather than with the absence of sightings.

And read the evidence rather than the sightings: rub marks along a wall base, droppings graded by size and age, gnawing at a particular corner, and the polished appearance of a route in use. A cellar swept the morning of the survey has erased the map. Moving stored goods a foot back from the perimeter is useful; cleaning is not.

What is the right scope for a tower?

Completely different, and concentrated in three places.

New construction here replaces yards and party walls with designed service routes, which is an improvement in principle and a concentration of risk in practice. Three features carry almost all of it.

The refuse chute and refuse room. The city rule governing chutes sets a demanding physical standard — heavy masonry or reinforced concrete construction, straight and plumb, a minimum inside dimension, extending above the roof, with approved self-closing hoppers at each service opening and a refuse room with a floor sloped to a drain. It also requires the chute, the room and their fittings to be kept clean, sanitary and free of vermin, and requires the owner to establish a treatment program and keep records of it available for inspection.

That last clause is a duty rather than a suggestion, and the failures are always small and mechanical rather than dramatic: a self-closing hopper whose mechanism has worn and now stands slightly open, a chute that has not been cleaned on schedule, a refuse room door that no longer seals at the bottom, a floor drain that has dried out. Any one of them turns a controlled system into the most productive feature in the building.

Riser penetrations. A tower carries plumbing, heating, sprinkler, electrical and telecommunications services vertically through every floor slab. Each of those penetrations was sealed at construction and each has been reopened by subsequent fit-outs, cable runs and repairs. A sleeve that was firestopped when the building opened is not necessarily firestopped now, and a seal that resists flame does not necessarily close a quarter-inch gap.

The loading dock and service corridors. A dock is a large opening in the building envelope that is held open for parts of every day, with a threshold that vehicles drive over and a route that leads directly into the service core.

The work in a tower is therefore mechanical and procedural rather than structural: hopper mechanisms serviced, chute cleaning on a schedule that is documented, refuse room drainage functioning, riser sleeves re-sealed after every trade, dock thresholds and door sweeps maintained. It is boring, it is auditable, and it is the whole job.

Do the two stocks affect each other?

Constantly, because they share the ground.

This is the part that a building-by-building approach cannot see. A tower and a nineteenth-century walk-up two doors apart have almost nothing in common structurally, and they have everything in common at street level. They set waste out on the same sidewalks. They drain into the same combined system. Their rear conditions open onto the same block interiors. When a site between them is excavated, the displaced population reaches both.

Two practical consequences follow.

Containerisation only works at the block. One large building moving to properly serviced containers on a block where six small buildings are not compliant has improved its own frontage and left the interior fed.

A tower’s waste discipline affects its small neighbors and vice versa. A refuse room whose door does not seal supplies the block, not just the building. A three-family house storing bags in an open areaway does the same thing at a smaller scale.

The uncomfortable conclusion is that the most effective rodent work available in this neighborhood is coordination between owners who have no relationship with each other and no obvious reason to talk. It is slow. It is also the only thing that reduces a block’s population rather than moving it four doors along, and the containerisation rollout has given everybody a reason to have the conversation.

Is it mice or rats, and does the answer change the work?

It changes everything, and the two are routinely quoted as one line item by people who have not looked.

Norway rats are the below-grade, boundary and drainage problem described above. They burrow, they use the sewer, they live in block interiors and construction ground, and they get into buildings at the cellar line or up through the drainage. Evidence is large droppings, burrow entrances two to four inches across with a fan of loose earth outside, runs worn into soft ground, and gnawing at the base of doors and around service entries. The work is exterior boundary, drainage and waste.

House mice are an internal, vertical problem. They do not need the sewer or the yard. In the older stock they live in party walls and joist pockets; in the towers they live in riser chases and the voids around service penetrations. Evidence is much smaller droppings concentrated along wall bases and inside cupboards, gnawing at food packaging rather than at structure, and grease marks on a route used repeatedly. The work is internal sealing at penetrations and shafts.

The reason to separate them before anything is priced is that neither scope touches the other. Exterior stations, waste management and drainage repair have essentially no effect on a mouse population living inside the building’s walls. Sealing riser sleeves and party-wall pockets will not touch a rat population living under the yard or coming up the house drain. A building that has spent two years on one problem while suffering from the other will have a thick service file and no result.

There is also a diagnostic trap specific to this neighborhood. A building near an active construction site will see a genuine rat influx, and a household inside that building may simultaneously have a long-standing mouse population that nobody had bothered about. The dramatic event masks the chronic one, and when the site closes and the rats subside, the mice are still there and the building concludes the treatment failed.

What does the ground floor add on the commercial corridors?

A food source and a second operator, on streets where the mixed-use pattern is the norm rather than the exception.

The commercial overlays that the 2009 rezoning narrowed are the zoning expression of something visible on any avenue here: bars, restaurants, cafés, bakeries and small food production occupying the ground floor of buildings whose upper stories are flats. On the corridors where the higher-density contextual district was applied, that arrangement is standard.

The mechanism does not differ between a walk-up and a tower. A ground-floor kitchen generates organic waste, warmth, grease and standing water, and it discharges into the same house drain as the apartments above. A rat population supported by a tenancy’s waste handling lives in the cellar the residents share, and a residential complaint upstairs is a commercial question until it is ruled out.

Two things follow that owners on these streets should treat as routine.

The survey has to include the tenancy, or the proposal has to say honestly that it does not. Whether it can is usually a lease question rather than a technical one, and it is far easier to settle at renewal than in the middle of a case.

The tenancy needs a program built for a food premises, which is a different discipline from residential work — restaurant pest control, or for production and packing operations food facility IPM.

The waste question on these corridors deserves its own sentence, because it is where the volume is. A bar putting out bags at closing time onto a sidewalk that will not be collected for six hours is feeding the block, whatever anyone upstairs does with their own refuse. Rigid containers with tight-fitting lids, in sufficient number, stored inside where the building allows it, is the measure that changes the block’s carrying capacity. It is also the measure that the containerisation program is progressively making non-optional.

What does the waterfront and the creek add?

High groundwater, wet cellars and a below-grade insect problem that travels with the rodent one.

The blocks near the East River and near the creek sit on ground where the water table is close to the surface, in a network that surcharges most weeks. Below-grade plant rooms, cellars and service levels there are damp by default rather than by neglect.

For rodents that matters because a wet cellar re-attracts whatever the sealing excluded, and because drainage that ponds is drainage that is not discharging, which usually means it is blocked somewhere. For insects it produces a permanent below-grade population of the drain-associated cockroach species that surfaces into occupied floors in warm, wet weather — a drainage problem wearing an insect costume, covered at cockroach control in Williamsburg.

The remediation work around the inlet and the creek is a long-running program with its own timetable, and it is not something an individual owner can act on. What an owner can act on is the building’s own relationship with the water: whether the cellar drainage discharges, whether the traps hold, whether the sump works, and whether the below-grade openings are closed with something that will still be there in ten years.

Who is responsible, and what does that mean here?

The owner, and in this neighborhood the owner is as likely to be one person with three flats as a managing agent with four hundred.

A building arranged for three or more independent households is generally a multiple dwelling, and the Housing Maintenance Code duty to keep the premises free of rodents, insects and other pests sits with the owner — NYC Housing Maintenance Code — extermination and rodent eradication. That catches a very large share of the older stock here, whose owners frequently do not think of themselves as landlords in the regulatory sense.

Local Law 55 adds the scheduled duty: periodic investigation of units and common areas, remediation by integrated pest management, repair and sealing of holes, gaps and cracks in durable materials, and door sweeps closing gaps to no more than a quarter of an inch. It states directly that pesticide use does not substitute for those measures, and any pesticide must be applied by an applicator licensed by the state (NYS pesticide applicator requirements). Applications in a multiple dwelling carry notification duties — Local Law 36 pesticide notification and the New York neighbor notification law.

Buildings with a chute carry the additional duty described above. Owners letting apartments should read landlord and tenant pest responsibilities; condominium and cooperative boards, co-op and condo board obligations; managing agents running several buildings here, property management pest control. Anyone comparing proposals should read choosing a pest control contractor — and should ask any bidder which of the two building types they are quoting for, because a method built for one is close to useless on the other.

Ground-floor bars, restaurants and small food production along the commercial corridors run through the commercial program and restaurant pest control, and their waste handling is frequently the largest single variable on a residential block.

For comparison, Brooklyn Heights and Park Slope are the borough’s intact rowhouse markets, where the same party-wall and block-interior logic applies without the towers or the creek — see rodent control in Park Slope. Across the river, SoHo shows what happens when the below-grade void is under the sidewalk rather than under the building. Within your own building, bed bug treatment in Williamsburg deals with the same two-stock split for a different organism.

If a site is about to open on your block, that is the moment to close your own building rather than the moment to complain. Get in touch and describe the building and what is happening around it.

Related

• Rodent Control — how we approach it
• All pest control in Williamsburg
• Cockroach Control in Williamsburg
• Bed Bug Treatment in Williamsburg