Rat complaints are soaring, and D.C. is doubling down on its efforts to kill them

They scurry across alleyways. They chew through trash cans. They make a sound that’s something between a hiss and a chatter.

And despite the District’s efforts, the number of rats in Washington seems to be growing.

Complaints to 311 about rodents in the nation’s capital reached an all-time high in 2017 — totaling 5,310, a 50 percent increase from 2016 — and are on track to increase in 2018.

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“It’s an eternal war,” said Mark Eckenwiler, an Advisory Neighborhood Commission member who lives on Capitol Hill. “You can kill them in one location and they pop up in another.”

The Washington Post examined more than 15,000 rat complaints reported to the District government over more than five years. In some of the city’s most densely populated areas, where trendy bars and restaurants have proliferated, complaints have increased at staggering rates: Shaw saw a 436 percent increase in complaints from 2014 to 2017, Columbia Heights a 449 percent increase and Capitol Hill a 430 percent increase.

D.C. Council member Charles Allen (D-Ward 6), whose ward includes Capitol Hill, said he began hearing more complaints about a year and a half ago, when “people started seeing this explosion of the rat population.”

“Those complaints have never subsided,” said Allen, who has introduced a bill that would require restaurants to follow pest-prevention plans and would establish a fund for inspection and enforcement of rodent control violations.

The neighborhood with the highest number of complaints in 2017 was Petworth, followed by Columbia Heights, Capitol Hill, Near Northeast, 16th Street Heights, Logan Circle, Park View, U Street and Shaw. Complaints in those neighborhoods represented about 43 percent of the complaints lodged last year.

From 2016 to 2017, those neighborhoods saw between a 25 percent to 74 percent increase in rodent complaints. This year, they are on pace to see a repeat or increase in the number.

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“It’s off the charts,” said Brian McQuaid, an inspector with American Pest Control. He said the small exterminating business has grown in recent years because of an increase in complaints about rodents and bedbugs.

Luke Beyer, a 20-year-old intern who lives in a basement apartment with an alleyway entrance in the Park View neighborhood, said he sees one to four rats each night when he comes home after dusk — which he dubbed “the rat hour.”

“They’re friskier then because it’s night and they’re hungry,” said Beyer, of Durham, N.C., who added that he had never seen so many rats before he arrived in the District this summer. “They’re a D.C. novelty.”

In Park View, a residential neighborhood north of Howard University, there were 199 complaints in 2017 — up 137 percent from 2014. There have been 128 complaints in 2018.

In the beginning of the summer, a dead rat was outside Beyer’s gate for several days, which he said gave him a sense of the size of the District’s rodents.

“It’s always hard to tell with the tail,” he said about their size. “They’re pretty big — probably on average six inches long.”

In response to a growing outcry among residents, who complain on email listservs and during hearings at the John A. Wilson Building, the city has added a variety of tools to its rat-fighting war chest.

Officials last year began using dry ice to suffocate rats in their burrows. They also installed solar state-of-the-art trash cans in “rat hot spots” and provided grants to businesses that lease commercial trash compactors.

Still, if the new trash that comes with new residents and new construction isn’t stored properly, that will mean more rats, said Gerard Brown, who oversees the D.C. Department of Health’s rodent control division. Rodents cause property damage and chew on electrical wires, which can start fires, and also can spread disease.

From 2007 to 2017, the number of bars and restaurants in the District jumped about 25 percent — from 1,863 to 2,325, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics.

“The rats are in some ways a byproduct of the success of the city,” said D.C. Council member Jack Evans (D-Ward 2), noting the city’s population passed 700,000 this year.

Brown said that recent mild winters mean fewer rats are dying from frigid temperatures.

Mayor Muriel E. Bowser (D), who has gone on rat walks through the city’s alleys and watched as dry ice was stuffed into a burrow during a demonstration with Brown this past winter, committed to increasing the rodent division’s budget for next fiscal year by nearly $1 million — up from $1.36 million this fiscal year.

Brown said he will use the money to hire additional staff, provide handheld devices so inspectors can input real-time data and to pilot a rat sterilization program.

D.C. Department of Health spokeswoman Alison Reeves said she expects improvements in all eight wards when the new initiatives are implemented, noting that when restaurants install trash compactors, they have seen a decrease in rodent activity.

Brown, who has been killing rats in the District for three decades, has nine pest-control workers and four code enforcement officers in the division. The last time Brown said the division saw an increase in staff size was under Mayor Anthony A. Williams, who convened a rat summit in 1999 that was reportedly the first of its kind in the county.

“We’re getting our shopping list today, and on Oct. 1, we’re going to start pushing buttons,” Brown said, noting the date of his department’s budget increase, as he strolled down an alley spotting rat burrows where his staff then sprayed rat poison.

Advisory Neighborhood Commission member Barbara Rogers said she asked Brown to visit her largely residential Northeast neighborhood near the Maryland border because of the rats she and her neighbors see at night.

“We’re not talking about small rats,” Rogers said. “We’re talking about big rats . . . We want to stay on top of this.”

About five miles south of Rogers’s home, Colleen Gallopin was dealing with a rat problem so bad that she said “it got to the point of absurdity.”

Gallopin, 39, who lives off the H Street corridor in Northeast, said rodents created a “rat highway” between their burrows in her neighbors’ backyards and the bustling H Street restaurants.

“Every night before bed I would just sit and watch them run across back and forth, and I could count 50 or 60 in a night,” said Gallopin, the executive director of a healthcare nonprofit organization.

She and her neighbors watched as their gardens were destroyed. She mostly stopped letting her young children play in the backyard. She called 311 twice, and inspectors arrived and treated her property, but to no avail. The rats continued to make their nightly trek through her backyard.

She said the rat population seemed to decrease only after she and four other neighbors coordinated this summer to hire a private pest control company and worked with their Advisory Neighborhood Commission member to ensure restaurants improved their trash storage.

“This is not an individual issue — we can’t address it house by house . . . and we need to think about it on a larger scale,” she said. “There will always be rats. I don’t have a problem with that. We share the city. But there needs to be a balance.”