Swimming in toilets, rushing through classes and even interfering with a local badminton match: rats are once again ravaging a part of the city, this time on a street in Old Ottawa East.

Like residents of many Ottawa communities, Jamie Brougham and his neighbors have been dealing with rats since the summer.

He would walk over to his bird feeder, look out from his deck, and see them gathering below.

It was then that he began to set traps.

“(I caught) probably six, and I got one with a shovel, which was pretty gross. But the worst part was once you caught them,” he said . “It’s a miserable experience.”

CBC spoke to Brougham and several other neighbors about the rat problem, which included rodents running across the street in broad daylight.

In one case, they saw several rats scurrying around during their street party in September. In another, a neighbor saw them running alongside their children’s badminton game.

But that wasn’t the worst.

Break-in in the bathroom

At the beginning of September, a neighbor let a rat into his toilet. They remember seeing his tail swinging in the bowl before going back into the pipes.

Since then, many neighbors on the street have joined forces to try to get rid of the pests.

“We decided to stop feeding the birds,” Brougham said. “(And) you need to be careful with your compost.”

Seven residents also called the city in mid-September, he added.

“A number of people were concerned,” Brougham said. “And some were really freaked out, you know, it’s understandable.”

Baiting the sewers

Over the next week, neighborhood officers visited their street near Brantwood Park, he said, to inspect the rat situation.

During a previous infestation this year in a Kanata townhousebylaw enforcement officers warned one of the residents to take care of the problem himself.

But this time, the City of Ottawa is taking a different approach: it’s attacking the sanitary sewers it owns.

This is only done as a “last resort when rat activity is detected in the sewer system” as it has “very limited effectiveness and only works in specific cases”, according to a statement attributed to Marilyn Journeaux, director of the city’s water system and customer. services.

On September 27, the city announced it had deployed the poison bait. Since then, they said they check the drains every two weeks to see if rats are still roaming around.

During the last check, rat movements were detected, the city said – although Brougham said he had not seen any rodents since the bait was released.

On Saturday, Brougham shared a photo with CBC of a dead rat on his lawn.

“What the city did with the bait and the sewers was they brought in a hydrovac truck and they cleaned out the sewers and then they put the bait in. And since that time we haven’t haven’t seen them,” Brougham said.

“That was three or four weeks ago and I haven’t seen them since. So it’s really encouraging…the city has handled it really well.”

Sewers will continue to be baited until there is little or no rat activity for a month, the city said.

Educational efforts

But River Ward County. Riley Brockington said the burden of the citywide rat problem shouldn’t fall solely on the municipality’s shoulders.

“People are wondering what the city is doing. It’s a fair, very fair question. But at the end of the day, it’s a team effort, and until everyone works together and we don’t “If we haven’t specifically eliminated food sources, we won’t solve this problem.” said Brockington, whose efforts led to the recent relaunch of the city’s rat mitigation task force.

Made up of employees from various municipal departments, the group’s mission is to tackle the growing rat problem in Ottawa.

It tries to educate people on how to reduce rat numbers, Brockington said, while also taking small preventative measures, like converting park trash cans into containers that can only be opened by humans.

“A lot of the preaching to the public is about (how people should) not produce pet food, not produce birdseed at this time of year, pick up all the fruit that has fallen from the trees – anything rats can get into,” Brockington said. said.

“The dominance of food availability is what’s killing us in the city, and the solution is right in front of us.”