Complaints Soar More Than 1,900 Percent
By Mary Frost
Brooklyn Daily Eagle
BROOKLYN — About a week after Rob (he requested that his last name not be used) moved into his furnished apartment in Crown Heights, he realized that something was biting his arms and back in the middle of the night.
Rob now believes that his landlord knew all along that the apartment was infested with bedbugs. “My scum-of-the-Earth landlord just said, ‘Oh, hey, it looks like a problem,’” he told the Brooklyn Eagle. “He went through the moves with an exterminator, and he put a defogger in the room I was in. It never did anything.
“I could never fall completely asleep,” he said. To get some rest, “I had to try to stay as unconscious as possible. Night after night, only half asleep, trying to deal with the bugs.”
He eventually gave up and moved to a bedbug-free apartment in Bensonhurst.
But that is not the end of the story.
“A couple of weeks went by. I thought I had closure,” he said. “Then one day I saw one — it was the worst.” He threw out his bed and hired Kingsway Exterminating. “They came eight times; every two weeks for two months,” he said. “They went over the entire apartment. I had to take all my clothes, wash and dry clean them.”
By last December, they were gone. “It’s over. To this day I still feel relieved that they’re gone. The serenity has not faded,” Rob said.
Bedbugs — about a quarter-inch long and reddish brown, with oval, flattened bodies — are on the march across Brooklyn and all of New York City, as well as in rest of the United States.
According to the New York City Department of Housing Preservation and Development, Brooklyn calls to 311 to complain about bedbugs have surged more than 1,900 percent since 2004.
In fiscal year 2008 (through June 19), 311 received 3,248 complaints about bedbug infestations from Brooklyn residents. Ominously, most people never bother to call 311 to complain about the bugs, so these figures probably represent just a fraction of the bedbugs out there.
Broken down by Community District, Bushwick has the unfortunate distinction of being the bedbug capital of Brooklyn, with 550 calls from CD 4 to the City’s 311 line this year. In 2004, the same district recorded only 47 complaints.
Community District 14 — including Flatbush, Midwood and Prospect Park South — logged the next highest number of complaints, at 364 for the first half of 2008.
CD 2, covering Brooklyn Heights, Downtown Brooklyn, Boerum Hill and more, logged 64 bedbug complaints, while CD 18, encompassing Mill Basin and Flatlands had the fewest complaints, with only 43 calls during the same time period.
Inspect Before You See Them
“There are a lot of problems in Brooklyn,” notes Louis N. Sorkin, entomologist at the American Museum of Natural History (AMNH) and recognized bedbug expert.
Often, people don’t even recognize the bugs, he said. “Unfortunately, bedbugs are usually described as a quarter of an inch long and reddish-brown. But that’s only the adults. The newly hatched nymphs are only a 32nd of an inch long — that’s the thickness of a credit card — and whitish in color.”
Besides sighting the bugs themselves, signs of a bedbug infestation may include shed skins, bites, blood drops on the sheets, and dried-up defecated blood, Sorkin said.
While bedbugs can carry disease organisms, they’re not known to transmit disease to people — which might explain why Sorkin lets hundreds of bedbugs he keeps in jars at the AMNH feast on his own blood. (For the record, he upends the jars, covered with a screen, on top of his arm and leaves them there about 15 minutes.)
Sorkin advises inspecting for the bugs even before an infestation is suspected. “There’s almost no place you can think of where a bedbug might not be: wooden furniture, crevices, upholstered chairs and sofas.” He said that many hotels hire specially trained dogs to sniff out infestations.
Got ‘Em? Swing Into Action
Once you have them, immediate measures are called for.
“You need to use integrated pest management techniques, not only pesticide,” Sorkin says. Weapons in the arsenal include freezing treatments and heat, vacuuming, fine aerosol pesticide application, foam techniques, and the use of a substance called “diatomaceous earth.”
“It scratches their exocuticle [part of their outer ‘shell’] and absorbs the lipids from their skin,” he said. It’s not great for human skin either, so, “Don’t just scatter it all over; it belongs in places like cracks and crevices, switches and electric outlets.”
Clothing and other items have to go into a dryer set to the hottest setting — “not just in the washing machine,” he said. “Don’t pack the dryer full; the heat won’t penetrate all the way through. And vacuuming is important. After you’re done, either throw out the vacuum bag or put it in a Ziplock bag and freeze it.”
Pesticide needs to be applied to where the bugs are hiding, he says. “Bombing is not the best thing to do. It just makes them scatter, and it doesn’t penetrate in where they hide.”
Sorkin listed common hiding places for bedbugs: inside electric outlets, behind molding, under pictures, inside furniture, in recessed screw holes, on molded plastic chairs, and inside TVs, clock radios, remote controls, desktop computers and laptops.
“You have to isolate things — rooms from other rooms, apartments from other apartments. Adjacent apartments need to be treated as well, because the bugs move about between walls.
“You don’t necessarily have to throw your furniture away,” he said, “But throw out a badly infested mattress. It should be wrapped up. As people bring them through the halls, things drop off. And they should be labeled as infested.”
Mattress encasements can be really useful, he said. “The better ones have a locking mechanism so the bugs can’t crawl out of the zipper.
One pesticide treatment is not enough, he cautions, because bedbug eggs will continue hatching for several weeks after the first treatment. Treat again “after two weeks, and again after four weeks. Eggs may hatch, bed bug nymphs and adults that had been in hidden areas may very well have escaped pesticide application and will feed. Pesticide applications may have to be repeated after two weeks or four weeks depending on the pesticide.”
Seven months after his bout with the bugs, Rob still feels traumatized.
“It was a waking nightmare,” he told the Eagle. “They’re nocturnal. They come and get you while you’re sleeping.”
Now he lives with the knowledge that the bed bugs could come back. “You can go anywhere. They’ll hop on you on the subway, you bring them home, they breed.”
True Brooklyn Bedbug Stories
Rose:
We got them — probably — in the luggage of a houseguest who travels a lot.
What we did: we got rid of all the mattresses; dry-cleaned and/or washed all our clothes and bed linens; vacuumed and washed all our closets, shelves, drawers and rugs, and sprayed everything. We paid an exterminator $335. This did not get rid of the bugs.
We bought several additional chemical products from the exterminator and from a number of hardware stores and sprayed the rooms again ourselves. We kept our fingers crossed, and slept in the infested rooms, now treated, just to make certain we knew what was going on.
We seemed to have gotten rid of the bugs, but we still asked our houseguests to let us know of any and all bites, itches, swellings, etc. For a long time, there were no complaints, and we thought we had won the battle — until one of our houseguests called, and said that a bedbug walked out of his laptop when he returned home to Houston from Brooklyn!
We spray all rooms regularly and thoroughly, and by regularly I mean once a week, as soon as we suspect any activity, bedbugs or not. The white powder is useless!! Go out and buy bed bug chemicals and use them every week for two months minimum!
Catherine:
The bites first appeared in late summer 2006. I went to Canada for a few days and the bites disappeared and I got no new ones … Then back home to more bites. After biopsies, Doc finally convinced me to call the exterminator. I couldn’t believe bedbugs. They had disappeared after WW II with the advent of high-powered bug sprays.
I used no treatment myself on the house. Kingsway Exterminating did it all. This meant four visits, first one when the bugs (a dead one under the sofa) were identified. Then three more at one or two week intervals to treat the house.
Exterminators turned the stuffed furniture upside down, spraying all sides, cushions, etc. All rugs, all corners … In bedrooms, spraying under the beds, under mattresses, around the furniture, corners, etc. I stripped the beds as soon as I found out, sent all to the laundry or cleaners. Didn’t remake the beds until Christmas except for the one I slept in. Each room was the same — spray, spray.
The bites and their itching took a while to disappear — two or three weeks, partly because I kept scratching … Ointments for weeks. Sheer hell, the itching all the time.
Jenna:
We had it five years ago on Pacific (between Third and Nevins). I used bug spray everywhere, I vacuumed a couple of times. We left the house for weekends.
And it worked. Never again.
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