The Christian Science Monitor

In US capital, rats thrive where civic trust is low. Here’s how to fix that.

Nancy Balph talks like a national security official about battling her enemy: More eyes, more boots on the ground. If you see something, say something.

She’s tracking a cunning adversary that can penetrate fortresslike buildings. It multiplies exponentially if left unchecked. It has been the bane of humanity’s existence going back to at least the Middle Ages.

It is the rat. 

But it has met its match in Ms. Balph, a senior construction project manager at George Washington University in Washington, D.C., where a pungent odor grew as students emptied out during the pandemic and the rats moved in. At first she was curious. Then she was mad, thinking, “Wow, we can’t fix this? I find that hard to believe.” 

Ms. Balph walked the campus with an exterminator, city pest officials, and rat-tracking dogs. She learned to spot the burrows, the brown trails created by an oil the mammals

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