Ferndale community group hopes to tackle rat issues in Ferndale

FERNDALE — Ferndale has long had issues with rat infestations in the city.

The issue persisted so much that it led to the formation of the Ferndale Rat Patrol a decade ago to help both eliminate infestations and educate community members on what they can do to take out Ferndale’s rats.

One of the group’s founders, Mayor Pro Tem Laura Mikulski, reached out to the community to tackle the city’s rat issue and held a meeting on April 8 at Dessert Oasis Coffee Roasters to discuss.

Around a dozen residents gathered, and Mikulski explained how they all could help and educate others.

“We’re basically hoping to get people back to being activated in their neighborhood in a more organized fashion, instead of just onesie-twosies here and there,” she said. “We want to make sure that we’re spreading out the workload between older people that are passionate about this who can go out and educate people, respond to inquiries about evidence of rats, whether there’s a burrow that somebody needs help with, whether they need education on how to set traps. So, that was the point of tonight: trying to figure out how do we better organize rather than just educating people.”

Mikulski said the meeting was to gauge interest from the community, but she believes they need to meet more to have a better impact on the rat issue.

Rita Thomas, a resident who lives on Central Street, has gotten more involved with the Rat Patrol over the past six years. During this time, she said she learned that the best thing residents can do if they know there’s a problem in their neighborhood is to start communicating, work with neighbors on setting traps together and having Rat Patrol members come by to answer questions on what to do.

“If Ferndale gets a reputation of being a rat neighborhood, then obviously that’s not good for the businesses, it’s not good for people buying homes, any of that,” she said. “You want to be able to be out in your yard without the threat of a rodent passing at your feet.”

City Manager Colleen O’Tools said the rat problem is a public health issue and the extent of it is not something of which the city has a full picture, and the city wants anyone who sees rats to report them, either through the Rat Patrol’s portal or through Ferndale’s code enforcement or Department of Public Works team.

“We want to track those instances, as I said, for public health purposes,” she said. “If pests, like rats, are a problem for a particular property or location, we can in addition to the … remediation work that (the Rat Patrol) is doing, we can pursue code enforcement action and a more stringent approach, kind of in parallel.”

The most effective way to trap or take out rats, according to Thomas, is burrow busting, where residents pack the rat holes with dry ice and cover them with dirt to suffocate them.

“The beauty of it is you never have to actually see the dead animal,” she said. “And from what I understand, it’s a very humane way, like they’re sleeping already. It’s a humane way to take care of the issues.”

What she got out of the meeting, Mikulski said, was that people were interested in having more practice with burrow busting and then getting literature to start helping out their neighbors.

“It did seem like there was a fair amount of interest in having people be point people in the different quadrants of the city so that they can help their neighbors more readily,” she said.

Since starting the group in 2016, Mikulski has seen the group grow from 20 members to over 9,000 on Facebook.

While there isn’t any measure to track how successful the group has been in tackling the actual rat infestations, Mikulski said, the education aspect has gone over well and she’s even seen their methodology spread to cities like Chicago and Boston and as far as Germany.

“Having people be able to handle it themselves within their yard instead of being reliant on pest control companies, I think, has been wildly helpful,” she said. “There are a number of people here tonight that have never come to a Rat Patrol event that all raised their hands that said that they had done burrow busting and that, to me, is indicative of the power of the group. We put the educational material out there, they take that and start doing it.”

For more information about the Ferndale Rat Patrol visit, facebook.com/groups/TheRatPatrol.