(New York) Seeing Matt Deodato and his device to kill rats, Kasia storms out of the Mangia restaurant, of which she is the manager, in the 23e Street, just in front of Eataly, a Mecca for tourism and gastronomy in Manhattan.
“I can’t let you do this!” she exclaims, waving her arms on the sidewalk on a June afternoon. “The last time you came, people on the terrace took pictures and posted them on Instagram. I don’t want that anymore! »
“That” is an innovative – and very unsavory – method to combat one of New York’s endemic scourges.
Since last fall, Matt Deodato, owner of Urban Pest Management, has had a $3,500 device called BurrowRX, which asphyxiates rats by pumping low-concentration carbon dioxide into their burrows.
Or rather suffocates most rats. And this is where the shoe pinches.
PHOTO RICHARD HÉTU, SPECIAL COLLABORATION
Urban Pest Management owner Matt Deodato and his rat suffocation device
After the departure of Kasia, to whom he promised to return another day, the 58-year-old exterminator explains: “The dominant males are more resistant to carbon dioxide and sometimes manage to emerge from their burrow. »
“I wait for them at the exit and I kill them with this,” he adds, brandishing a kind of pitchfork.
A month earlier, during his first intervention in the tree pit located in front of the Mangia, Matt Deodato caused a stir among the customers seated on the restaurant terrace by harpooning a few rats as plump as they were groggy before his eyes.
“It’s disgusting,” he admits, walking to another tree pit and making a prediction about Kasia: “In the middle of summer, she’s going to implore me and say, ‘Please , get rid of these rats!” »
“Both disgusted and entertained”
Andrew Fine would advise him not to wait. Vice-president of the Association of the 86e Rue, this real estate agent remembers the nightmare he experienced on June 28, 2022, around 4:30 a.m., about 90 minutes before the opening of the polls on this New York primary day.
“I put up campaign posters for my favorite candidate wherever it was legal,” he says, standing at the intersection of 86e Street and 3e Avenue in the Upper East Side neighborhood of Manhattan.
PHOTO RICHARD HÉTU, SPECIAL COLLABORATION
The vice-president of the Association of the 86e Rue, Andrew Fine
There were dozens of rats running back and forth, here and there. One of them went over my foot. It was disgusting. I thought, “That’s enough.”
Andrew Fine, vice-president of the Association of the 86e Street
After several calls to 311, the number to report to complain of a rodent infestation, an employee of the New York Department of Health contacted him. He promised her bait boxes for 7 of the 21 infested tree pits along the 86e Street, two blocks away.
“An exercise in futility”, sums up Andrew Fine.
Then, last October, the district’s city councilor, Julie Menin, decided to dip into her discretionary budget to fund a new approach. For about $10,000, she hired Matt Deodato and his rat poison device.
“When he first came here, he put the hose of his device down the burrows and the rats started coming out,” Andrew Fine recalled. “He gutted one in front of the Victoria’s Secret store. I was both disgusted and entertained. »
PHOTO RICHARD HÉTU, SPECIAL COLLABORATION
Exterminator Matt Deodato, during an intervention in a tree pit
” It worked. Since then, I’ve only seen a hole or two that Matt has reworked. It is good. »
Drop in complaints
Good enough to have contributed to the drop in complaints against rats? Matt Deodato would never dare claim such a thing. But Mayor Eric Adams, a declared enemy of rats in New York, has no restraint.
Last week, his office made a big deal about the 15% drop in the number of rat complaints in May compared to the same month in 2022. The decrease follows the appointment in March of Kathleen Corradi as director of the “ city-wide rodent control” and the coming into effect in April of a new bylaw extending from 6 p.m. to 8 p.m. the time when garbage bags can be placed on sidewalks.
“While it’s still early days, any sign that there are fewer rats in our city is welcome,” said City Hall spokeswoman Kate Smart.
However, according to Michael Parsons, a specialist in urban ecology at Fordham University, the number of complaints is not a valid data to measure the rat population of a city.
“We have no evidence that the number of rats has decreased,” he said. Either way, “the numbers remain higher than those taken before 2022. I hope the City carefully documents its approaches so that the data for any success is clear and evident.”
In the meantime, what is clear and obvious, in the eyes of Matt Deodato, is that the rat problem in New York “is worse than ever”.
“I think COVID has a lot to do with it. Everything stopped, so the rats weren’t bothered by people as much. There was garbage everywhere. Their population has continued to grow,” says the exterminator, who estimates the number of rats in New York at around 20 million.
Break with tradition
Obviously, Matt Deodato’s method of killing rats isn’t the most “humane.”
In its parks, New York City prefers to use dry ice, which gradually releases CO2 in the galleries of rodents and asphyxiates their occupants. But the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) prohibits the use of this solution near buildings and residential areas.
Why then can Matt Deodato crack down wherever he pleases with his CO pumping contraption?2 ?
“Because the EPA hasn’t looked into our case yet,” he replies, pointing out that exterminators in Boston and Philadelphia also use BurrowRX.
In theory, bait boxes are also a humane way to kill rats. But Matt Deodato does not believe in their effectiveness in a city of 8.5 million inhabitants who pile a good part of their garbage on the sidewalks.
“I’ve seen rats settle in a bait box like it’s a condo,” the exterminator says after finishing off half a dozen rodents with his pitchfork outside a resort. home in Flatbush, Brooklyn.
However, he was not destined for this profession. Like the other members of his extended family, this Brooklyn native had to be a firefighter or a police officer. But after the death of a policeman cousin, killed in the line of duty, he decided to break with family tradition.
“I was in my early twenties. I said to myself: “I will not do that for $26,400 a year”, says the man who boasts today of having sent his three sons to private school, in addition to having acquired three houses, including one in North Carolina, and for buying a Maserati for Father’s Day.
“It’s a dirty job. Nobody wants to do it. But it allows me to live well. »
The rats that Matt Deodato comes across cannot say the same.