When Baltimoreans talk about rats, the conversation about the city’s most populous denizens tends to get ugly.

“It’s all about making them homeless and making them feel unwelcome,” said Chris Beall as he mixed a batch of concrete and crushed glass in a wheelbarrow.

He and his neighbors used the wet concoction – gray with shiny green, blue and pink shards – to fill rat burrows in their Patterson Park neighborhood.

The group had gathered in an alley between Potomac and Curley streets as part of their “first Saturdays” block cleanup, and rat hole filling was on their work list.

“As for the glass,” Beall explained, “rats will eat right through concrete, so we put in broken glass. It’s harder for them to chew through.”

He said he knows the city will bait the burrows with poison if they are active, but he doesn’t think the city actually closes them up to keep rats out.

Department of Public Works spokesman Jeffrey Raymond confirmed that the city does not fill in the rat burrows after baiting them, “but the property owner may wish to.”

Beall and his neighbors took turns filling in the holes in the alleys and yards in hopes that the furry disease-carrying vermin would, at the very least, move to a different block.

City Program Behind Schedule

Baltimore’s rat burrow eradication program, ramped up last November with the goal of baiting the most infested alleys every 20 days (to keep up with the rodents’ robust 20-day gestation cycle), is under way, albeit more slowly than the city expected.

Female rats can birth four to seven litters per year, with eight to 12 offspring per litter, according to the DPW.

But eight months after announcing the initiative, the agency still has only enough staff to bait the burrows every 40 days.

“We are still training most of the new hires,” said Raymond. “Finding enough people who are up to the job was a challenge.”

The agency, however, anticipates having a complete staff (15 field employees) fully trained by the end of this month.

Poison Injected

The rat abatement teams proactively bait confirmed rat burrows with ditrac, a powdered rat poison, injected into burrows with a specially designed applicator.

“It gets onto the rats’ fur, and into their system when they groom themselves. We have used it effectively for years,” Raymond said.

After applying the bait to the burrows, DPW staff notify the neighbors via hang tags on doors and a yellow tag near the burrow, he said.

After consuming the poison, rats will eventually die, either in the burrow or outside. Interestingly, while the city receives a number of 311 calls for dead rat pickup, DPW is not technically responsible for remove the animals’ carcasses.

“Residents may scoop them into trash bags and set it out with the rest of their weekly trash,” Raymond said.

Top Rat Hangouts

Rats are a problem all over the city, but DPW statistics from last fall (the most recent the agency has) show that the five neighborhoods with the highest number of rat-abatement requests were Belair-Edison, McElderry Park, Mondawmin, Sandtown-Winchester, and Coldstream/Homestead/Montebello.

“Since we introduced the municipal trash can program in Belair-Edison and Greater Mondawmin, the volume of calls for rat abatement in those two communities has declined, which demonstrates the importance of controlling food sources in controlling rat populations,” Raymond noted.

He was referring to the 9,000 municipal trash cans introduced into those communities last summer as part of a pilot program to provide high-quality, city-owned trash cans to residents.

DPW director Rudolph S. Chow has said residents’ failure to use trash cans with lids is one of the major contributors to the city’s rat problem.

The agency plans to roll out the trash can program citywide – which is expected to cost about $10 million – as soon as it can find the money.

Keeping it Clean

The Patterson Park area, and much of Southeast Baltimore, has been working on educating residents about the proper way to dispose of trash for years now.

Right now, the Patterson Park Greening Committee is putting the finishing touches on “The Patterson Park City Clean Guide,” said Theresa Carter Wotring, a Patterson Park resident who chairs the committee.

“The guide is a one-stop resource for most things trash and recycling,” said Wotring, and will be published before the end of the summer in English and Spanish.

The committee got a grant to write the guide, and DPW and several nonprofits, such as Banner Neighborhoods, helped put it together, she said.

Bridget Parlato, a Southeast resident and founder of Baltimore Trash Talk, did the graphic design work.

Coming Soon: Rat Analytics?

In addition to the proactive baiting of burrows in alleys, DPW continues to respond to reactive 311 calls for rat inspections and abatement both in alleys and on residential property.

The agency is also planning a predictive analytics program to identify relationships between various sanitation and 311 service calls  to better track where rat complaints are coming from.

The program, first discussed last fall, will help the department target deployment to the most needy areas, said Raymond, who couldn’t say for sure when the analytics tool would be ready.

“We want to incorporate the predictive analytics to make this process even more effective, but we’re not there yet,” he said, adding that no matter what kind of baiting the city does or what predictive models it might one day employ, reducing the amount of residential trash that’s accessible to rats has the biggest impact on controlling the rodent problem.

“It’s a good message that everyone can be part of the solution,” he said.

As for Beall and his neighbors, they’ll be keeping a close eye on the burrows to see how the rodents react to their new-found homelessness.

“We used to have  a lot more rats around. We’ve made good progress in the last two years,” he said. “Hopefully, they won’t come back.”