Yesterday it (finally) came to my attention that apparently in Castricum there’s a plague of brown rats. Afraid of ending up writing an FML, I visited a meeting that was held last night, during which people were informed about the status of the problem and measures already taken. This meeting also allowed people to ask questions and make suggestions. The representatives were 2 members of the town council, a member of KAD (who get rid of plagues) and Rentokil (who cooperate with KAD).
Now, I was wondering why I should go there since I haven’t seen any rats or signs of rats, but I thought I’d better be safe and check it out. The good news is, it probably won’t concern my area since all the houses there are new and have proper sewers. But most of the people I saw live in the older part of Castricum. Through the sarcasm and anger I heard several (shocking) facts:
- These people have been dealing with this issue for fifteen years. For the longest time, the town council got complaints but haven’t responded. Juicy detail: upon the question of how many complaints there were and how they were dealt with, there was no reply from any of the represented parties. I got the impression they haven’t been very adequate in the past.
- In cases where Rentokil did show up to fix the problem, they did their job poorly and they were apparently unsuccessful.
- The old sewers are made of glazed stoneware pipes (NL gresbuizen), which is a weak material and has disintegrated at certain places. That is where the rats can exit the sewers. Apparently these pipes should have been replaced years ago, but that hasn’t happened. One lady complained the maintenance in her street was now 6 years overdue.
- It took ages before people even had an inkling of where in Castricum this problem is going on. Of course the people who live in it know, but it would have been nice to know how widespread this problem is. There was no map, only a small indication of places that have been investigated. This brings me to the next point.
- Three neighbourhoods have been investigated. Actually only two-and-a-half, since one neighbourhood was only partly investigated. All the places they checked showed clear signs of rats. They would NOT admit, however, that it was an actual plague.
- In 1998, the Dutch government decided that consistently checking for rat plagues was no longer in their best interest. Since then, there has been no consistent data about the existence and/or nuisance of rats in the Netherlands. The reason why they cannot call this a plague is because they have no actual recent data indicating ‘normal’ values to compare against.
- The focus of this meeting was very much primarily put on what people have to do in their own homes in order to prevent rats from entering them. There was no insight into what the town council is going to do about the problem in public places, or if the sewers are finally going to be replaced.
People were very angry, and rightly so. I haven’t seen even one rat or met any of these people and this outrages me too. This is one big pile of negligence and governmental failure. I just hope this problem doesn’t move towards where I live.