By Tania Padgett, Staff Reporter
Honey Lance, 20, squints and then stabs an accusing finger towards a gray station wagon parked across the street on Hoe Avenue.
"Look," she shouts. "There's one over there."
Underneath the car, a foot-long rat scurries past the tires and dashes into a nearby lot.
"Don't walk on that side of street," Lance said, scanning the darkened Morrisania lot. "Because if you do, you won't be walking alone."
Now that it's getting warmer, more company might be on the way. While rat complaints dropped citywide in 1994, they rose in the borough. In 1994, the city's Health Department's Pest Control Bureau logged in 21,714 rat complaints -- a dip from 22,243 the previous year.
In the borough, however, rat sightings climbed to 4,600 from 3,782 during the same period. Although 1995 rat complaints are only 1,540, that number is expected to skyrocket this summer, said Ed Humphrey, director of the Bronx Pest Control Bureau.
"The Bronx has the worst rat infestation in the city," said Benedict Nnbuife, one of only two inspectors in the borough. "When I worked in Brooklyn, the infestation was bad there, too, but it wasn't as bad as the Bronx."
The reasons behind the rise are almost as many as the rodents themselves. Improper garbage disposal and illegal dumping create rat-conducive conditions, which are made worse, from the human point of view, by cutbacks in the city's pest control bureaus.
Ironically, community development projects meant to bring back the borough also play a part in the problem. Three weeks ago the Mid-Bronx Desperadoes, a housing development company, started drilling in a lot on Hoe Avenue, but not before warning neighbors about rats swarming because of the commotion.
"Whenever you have vacant land and you have development, the animals that live there will take up and leave," said Carla Penniman, a spokeswoman for the organization.
New construction may account for why rats are more visible, but it's the unsanitary conditions that keeps them thriving.
On Sheridan Avenue in Mott Haven, a mound of garbage bags rises in an alleyway next to an apartment building. In an adjacent lot, broken glass twinkles among soiled diapers and other debris. Nnbuife, the inspector, eyes numerous rat holes with openings the size of baseballs and droppings as large as elbow macaroni.
There's no question here, he said, these rats are big.
"This place is out of control," said Nnbuife. "This spot is one of the worst on the route."
Another problem spot is a Soundview house whose porch peeks from under a hill of paintings, statues and bound newspapers. The home, owned by a man who Nnbuife describes as eccentric, has created a significant rat problem, which has alarmed officials at Public School 41 across the street.
While rats can be found in Riverdale, Jake Corley, director of the Health Department's Pest Control Bureau, contends that they flourish in poorer communities where abandoned buildings are common and where disgruntled tenants may airmail their garbage out the window.
Improper garbage disposal is the biggest thorn in Pest Control's side. Although the bureau was spared during Mayor Rudolph Giuliani's first round of proposed cuts, it still suffers from the cutbacks of 1993.
"They cut us to the bone," Humphrey lamented. "Before the cutbacks two years ago, we had 90 men working in this bureau. Now there are just two teams of 10."
Because rats are so common on Hoe Avenue, Lance said that most people have gotten used to them.
But they shouldn't. According to experts, rats carry a number of potentially fatal diseases, such as rabies, rat-bite fever, salmonella and Hunter's virus, which killed a Long Island man last year.
Nnbuife's fears are more ominous: he's thinking about the bubonic plague that rats started in Europe in the Middle Ages.
"That is what we are trying to prevent from happening here," he said.