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Today, rodent complaints by residents from all over New York are electronically pinpointed on the city's computerized rat map, which allows inspectors to track complaints and hot spots over time and determine how well rat-control efforts are working. The results, after just one year, should be music to the ears of most New Yorkers: when the pilot study began in the Bronx, inspectors found active rat signs on 3,100 of the borough's 39,000 properties. Preliminary results now show that 1,250 of those properties are rat-free. That's a 40% drop-off in infestations...
Enter the rat map. On a recent patrol, Mills and his colleague Bobby Corrigan, a doctor of rodentology who also works for the New York City health department, were back in the Bronx, on West 184th Street. The target was an abandoned house sprayed over with graffiti - a vestige of the way much of New York used to look 20 years...
...next door. Rats like to scurry under things when they're out in the open. Sure enough, we find rat burrows under several scattered pieces of concrete. He points out a distinct musty odor - more evidence of rats. It all goes into the computer, which contains a detailed map, including the outlines of buildings...
...goes, building by building, lot by lot. Every garbage can without a lid, every window screen that had been nudged aside just enough to let a rat slip by, grease marks from rat hair along a concrete wall - it all gets noted and pinpointed on the map. "We train our inspectors to see what everyone overlooks," says Corrigan, echoing Sherlock Holmes. "This is a living laboratory. There's probably 100 variations in rat colonies in New York as to how they behave...
Under the old pen-and-paper system, inspectors could check out about 20 properties a day, according to Mills. The computerized geocoded map allows them to catalog 10 times as many...