More on the multi-unit building in Brattleboro, Vermont where landlord Ron Gaida took out a $3000 loan from the town to help pay for bed bug treatment.

The Brattleboro Reformer cites Daniel Dente, owner of Vernon, Vermont PCO firm Abatem as saying 125 Canal Street has now been “treated with chemicals approved by the Environmental Protection Agency to kill bed bugs.”

Tenants have returned home.

It is not clear from the article whether there will be any follow-up treatments or inspections. I hope there will be — of course, the chemicals are approved by the EPA for use on bed bugs, but it does not mean they normally kill all the bed bugs in one application.

Dealing with bed bugs living in furniture may help speed the process of treatment. In addition to chemical treatment of the building, The Reformer also reports that the tenants had sofas, beds, and easy chairs treated in Abatem’s heat truck:

Those items were put into a specially designed truck where they were heat treated at 140 degrees for about an hour, said Assistant Fire Chief Peter Lynch, who is also the town’s health officer. The heat treatment killed the bed bugs, he said.

Clothes and linens were laundered in hot water and dried at temperatures around 160 degrees to guarantee they were free of the pests, said Lynch, who insisted every precaution was taken to insure the bed bugs didn’t survive the treatment.

“We were confident all the laundry was clean when it came back,” he said.

The way things are going elsewhere, Peter Lynch may yet have to deal with bed bugs in both his capacity as Fire Chief and as health officer. Let’s hope not!

Though thermal trucks are not a novel idea (Adams Pest in MN has a thermal trailer pictured here), Abatem’s truck was retrofitted by the company:

The heated truck used to be an old moving truck, said Dente, which he and his team retrofitted for just this purpose. This was the fourth time it had been used to eliminate pests, he said.

Until every home has a bed bug sauna, thermal trucks are something we’d like to see a lot more of.

Good luck to Ron Gaida, his tenants, and the team that did their treatment. I truly hope the problem there is solved — or at least close to being solved.Similar Posts:

None Found

On Friday, the New York Times Real Estate Q&A clarified the issue of who pays for bed bug treatment in rented condo units:

“The condominium owner would have the primary responsibility,” said Robin LoGuidice, a Manhattan real estate lawyer. The respective responsibilities between the owner and the board are governed by the condo’s bylaws. But if the building has three or more residential units, the registered managing agent may have some responsibility as well, she said.

Ms. LoGuidice said that the tenant should write to the owner and request immediate remediation and send a copy of the request to the board of managers and the registered managing agent.

[Emphasis mine.]

See: Dealing With Bedbugs in a Rented Condo – Real Estate Q&A Blog – NYTimes.com.Similar Posts:

• Bed bugs in Time Out New York’s Apartment issue
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• Baltimore’s 311 Online now has a bed bug complaint option

Remember the 160-unit Hacienda high rise in Richmond, California?

We suggested last month that one bed bug spray treatment probably would not be enough to get rid of bed bugs in this affordable housing complex.  And sadly, we were right.

The backstory on this is that tenants council complained to the city about bed bugs in April and were given piecemeal treatment of “a handful of units” back in May; the management said it knew of 11 units infested with bed bugs, even though 63 tenants had signed a petition asking the city to get rid of bed bugs.

Finally, in the last month, the city came through with a plan and funding to get the entire building tented and fumigated — with what, we do not know.  The article says “A large tent is scheduled to be cast over the 160-unit Hacienda high-rise Friday morning, and crews will spray the building with a pesticide.”

The Contra Costa Times reports that

Tenants begged the city to tent and fumigate the building rather than spray individual apartments, as it did in May, to ensure the pests are killed for good. The Housing Authority agreed and moved ahead with the plan.”Once they got started, they really haven’t wasted any time getting on top of it,” said Dolores Johnson, president of the tenants council.

The Housing Authority is tallying up expenses and doesn’t know what the final price tag will be, [Manuel Rosario, deputy director of the city Housing Authority] said, but booking the hotel rooms for tenants to stay several days will cost more than $60,000. Each family also is receiving a per diem for food. The amount varies, but can run in the hundreds of dollars per unit.

That $60,000 price tag only covers the hotel stay for tenants!

The article notes that some units are infested with fleas and others with bed bugs.

Interestingly, the move-out plan included having residents’ dogs and cats bathed upon evacuation:

In the rear parking lot, pet owners handed their dogs and cats over to groomers waiting in a mobile pet-grooming van. Candace Kidd, lead dog stylist for Aussie Pet Mobile in Marin County, used a plant-based product to wash the animals. Groomers found at least one dog with bedbugs hidden in its fur.

“They (bedbugs) are very similar to fleas,” said Dave Ely, owner of Aussie Pet Mobile. “They’re a bloodsucking insect. They get on you, and at night, they munch on you.”

I hope the plan goes well, and that tenants are educated about how not to take bed bugs to other places (like hotels or family members’ homes), and that tenants and staff are also educated about how to avoid bringing bed bugs into the building again in future.Similar Posts:

• Bed bugs bite in Richmond, California public housing development
• RainCity Housing’s “bed bug sauna” now active in new Vancouver building
• Depot Square in St. Johnsbury, VT: 39 of 47 units infested
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• Bed bugs “a disaster no different from a fire” Brattleboro, VT Selectboard is told

The Edmonton Sun reports that

Swarms of bloodthirsty bedbugs are taking over entire apartment buildings across the city, and public health officials warn that it’s only getting worse.

And how do bed bugs come to take over “entire apartment buildings”?

Step one: when tenants complain of bed bugs, treat once and never follow up.

[Tenant April Lariviere] first noticed the bugs in her furniture last spring. It’s gotten so bad in her northside apartment that she’s had to throw out their mattresses, couches and chairs. They now sleep on air mattresses on the living room floor.

“We’re living in Tupperware containers,” she said. “Everything has to be sealed up to keep the bedbugs off.”

She said the building was fumigated in the spring, but the bugs came right back.

“Nothing’s happened since them,” she said. “There was no follow-up.”

[Emphasis mine.]

Bed bugs are not new to Edmonton; the city has been struggling for years.

What are the laws regarding bed bugs in Edmonton?  According to the CBC,

Alberta’s public health act and housing regulations require a landlord to provide a tenant with a healthy and habitable environment. A tenant with bedbugs is advised to report the dwelling to the regional health authority. Health inspectors will then assess the problem and in most cases order the landlord to take care of it.

In the Sun article, Ken Dong, a senior environmental health official with Alberta Health, notes matters are complicated in the building Lariviere lives in, because many tenants are renting their suites from individual condo owners who live out of town.  But Alberta Health is now on the case:

After several complaints from tenants, Dong said, a health inspector recently went through the place again and informally told the management company to work with the condominium board and tenants to get rid of the pests.

Dong acknowledged that it’s complicated because most of the suites’ owners live out of town and rent them out.

He said inspectors will continue to monitor the building, and if they’re not satisfied with how the infestation is being handled, they can slap the condo board with a formal order. Failure to comply with the order could result in fines. They can also order suites vacated.

It would be a shame if the tenants lost their homes after having suffered from bed bugs for so long.  Let’s hope it does not come to that.

Living in the Edmonton area? 

Capital Health has a Bed Bug Prevention PDF and a Bedbugs Fact Sheet; you can download both here.Similar Posts:

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• Depot Square in St. Johnsbury, VT: 39 of 47 units infested

Thank goodness the building is under the care of a community organization and landlord that is not willing to put up with this building being only 85% bed bug-free.

Remember this campaign to free a 20-unit Manchester, New Hampshire building (Langdon Mill Apartments) of bed bugs?

A group called NH Bed Bugs, spearheaded by members of the American Friends Service Committee and the Granite State Organizing Project, went to great lengths to try and solve the bed bug problem at Langdon Mill.

As the Concord Monitor reported Sunday,

They moved the families out of the building. They washed and dried all of their clothes and bedding on high heat. They threw out almost all of the furniture they owned – not just mattresses and couches, but tables and desks, too – and solicited donated replacements. After exterminators had sprayed everything, the families came back.

Unfortunately, when new mattresses were being brought back in on Wednesday, three units still showed signs of a bed bug infestation.

Though vastly improved, the building will continue to be treated.

Make no mistake, it is a vast improvement: the building has had bed bugs since 2005, and when NH Bed Bugs stepped in, every unit was infested.

NH Bed Bugs threw itself into the project, and learned on a large scale what individual bedbuggers learn: how difficult and expensive it is to get rid of bed bugs.

Maggie Fogarty, of the American Friends Service Committee told the Concord Monitor,

“. . . we couldn’t ask these refugee tenants to run every piece of clothing they had through a high heat cycle in the dryer. It cost us thousands of dollars to do it for them,” Fogarty said. “They certainly couldn’t afford to go out and buy all new stuff, even secondhand stuff.

“One of the problems we have not figured out is, how do you do this if you’re of limited means? How do you do this effectively?” she said. “It’s a very expensive problem.”

And Fogarty is mindful too of the difficulty of helping people get rid of this problem:

“We cannot convene hundreds of volunteers, and tens of thousands of dollars, for every building in New Hampshire,” Fogarty said. “We have to step back and look, systemically, how we can prevent this problem from spreading.”

[Emphasis mine.]

There are two important points here:

1. Bed bug preparations and treatment are time consuming and costly.  If people cannot afford the costs of bed bug preparations and treatment, or cannot manage the physical labor, then bed bugs will continue to thrive and spread.
2. Bed bugs are a fact of life and cannot be completely avoided.

Some steps may help curtail their spread and/or help stop them in their tracks when they are brought in:

• Everyone needs to be educated about how to avoid bringing bed bugs home;
• Residential buildings, schools, office buildings, public transportation, and other locations need regular professional inspections to detect bed bugs;
• Cracks and wall voids may need to be dusted and sealed, and other preventive measures taken to foil the odd bed bugs which may be brought in.

Similar Posts:

• Saatchi and Saatchi New York offices infested with Bed Bugs
• Frankfort, Kentucky Public Housing Authority plays the “bed bug blame game”
• 18-story Dayton apartment building infested with bed bugs to be treated with Vikane gas
• Bed bugs bite Edmonton
• Bed Bugs hit Johnson City Fire Station

All of the residents of Kansas City, Missouri’s Plaza Towers apartments are being evacuated for two nights so that the entire 81-unit high-rise can be treated using ThermaPureHeat’s thermal methods.

Residents told KMBC reporters they had as little as six days’ notice before evacuating and they were understandably frustrated by this.

On the other hand, many tenants with bed bugs would give anything to have their landlords treat the entire building using thermal methods –which, done properly, solve the bed bug problem in one treatment.

The building has had bed bugs for “about 18 months.”

Tenants were given free hotel rooms with breakfast and drink vouchers for the two nights they had to evacuate their homes.

Thermal treatment can get rid of bed bugs in one go, but what thermal methods can’t do is prevent bed bugs from being reintroduced into the structure — the day tenants return, or weeks or months later.

Everyone who has contact with the building must be educated and take steps to avoid such a scenario.  And it isn’t easy.

We can only hope tenants and employees were thoroughly educated about:

• what they should take with them (if anything) while the building is being treated, and how these items should be treated to be ensured to be free of bed bugs;
• how to avoid bringing bed bugs to a hotel (or any other place they would be staying — relative’s home, friend’s home, employee’s home), and how to avoid picking bed bugs up from those same places;
• the possibility that bed bugs came to the building via a tenant’s or employee’s friend’s or relative’s home, or a school or workplace — even if no one else was aware of a problem there;
• the dangers of taking in secondhand items, which may also have brought the problem in.

In the KMBC video linked above, it was disturbing to see a tenant load an open cloth bag of clothing and a computer into his car, as he prepared to evacuate for treatment.  Bed bugs could potentially be carried in these items — not just to a car or hotel, but back into the building after treatment.

Ultimately, a building like this needs an education program (starting with the above information), as well as an ongoing plan for inspections and prevention.

Dusting and sealing cracks and crevices between units and regular professional inspections may go some way towards preventing future bed bug problems.

Prompt, aggressive treatment (and extensive inspections) at the first sign of future bed bug bites or bed bug sightings may help avoid the need to treat the whole building again.

And at $65,000, that would be a worthwhile goal.

Similar Posts:

• Large Philadelphia Seniors’ Apartment Building Gets Thermal Remediation for Bed Bugs
• Towels under the door: when cities abandon tenants with bed bugs
• More stories of bed bugs in Halifax public housing
• RainCity Housing’s “bed bug sauna” now active in new Vancouver building
• Saatchi and Saatchi New York offices infested with Bed Bugs

On August 22nd, an entire 18-story apartment building in Dayton, the Biltmore at 210 N. Main St., is being treated for bed bugs with Vikane (sulfuryl fluoride) gas fumigation.  Residents will be evacuated for a week (to friends’ homes, or to a local hotel).

The Dayton Daily News reports that this process is only being undertaken after two years of unsuccessful spraying of individual units:

Because the infestation has resisted floor-by-floor fumigation for two years, [Denver-based building owners] Aimco said, the building-wide attack with the deadly gas is now the only option.

Aimco spokeswoman Cindy Duffy said residents should be ready to return Aug. 30. She had no cost estimates for the project, but said the money for the fumigation and relocation would come from Aimco’s operational budget.

Interestingly, last October, AIMCO evacuated a Philadelphia building for thermal treatment.  We have not heard any follow-up on that case; it would be interesting to know why Vikane was chosen in the Dayton case.

It’s important to note that when an entire building is treated, residents, management and staff will likely need to be educated about how to avoid bringing in bed bugs again — because if they can be brought in to the building once, they can be brought in again, and again.

Management should also have some continued inspection policy.  Some PCOs might want to use additional treatments such as a mechanical dust to nip future infestations in the bud, and methods like caulking to help prevent future infestations from spreading.

However, nothing is more important than making sure residents and staff know how bed bugs spread, how to avoid and spot them, and that they will suffer no repercussions for reporting them swiftly in future.

Future reports of bed bug bites or sightings must be met with swift attention — and not just attention to the unit where the complaint was made.

The Dayton Daily News also notes that

The Biltmore, which receives Department of Housing and Urban Development Section 8 subsidies, isn’t the only apartment building in the area with bedbug problems.

(Incidentally, you may recall that a few weeks ago, HUD told a landlord in Florida that tenants did not have to pay to treat their bed bugs, as the building owner was insisting.)

The Dayton Daily News also illuminated the details of the spread of bed bugs in Dayton:

Tom Hut, a supervisor with Public Health — Dayton & Montgomery County, said he’s receiving a dozen queries a day, mostly from apartment dwellers, about bedbug infestations. That’s a jump from a dozen queries per week in 2008, he said.

This is troubling: if we assume Hut is only getting calls about bed bugs Monday-Friday, that’s still five times as many bed bug queries per week now as in the prior year.

Dayton needs to take bed bugs very seriously.

See the full story in the Dayton Daily News: Bedbug war to empty downtown apartments.

Note: as bbbites and cilecto pointed out in a thread on this story in our Bedbugger Forums, be aware that there’s some odd advice in the Tips for Avoiding Bed Bugs inset, for example, “Regularly launder bedding in very hot water, especially when coming back from a trip.”  Unless you travel with your own bedsheets (which we do not recommend), this does not make much sense.  For more detailed travel advice, see our Travel FAQs.Similar Posts:

• Large Philadelphia Seniors’ Apartment Building Gets Thermal Remediation for Bed Bugs
• Bed bugs infest New Rochelle cell block and three police cars
• Bed bugs in Grand Forks, North Dakota public housing
• Entire Kansas City high-rise gets thermal treatment for bed bugs
• Bed bugs bite in Edmonton sleep disorder clinic

WFTV in Florida helped some low-income tenants with bed bugs to get help.

The owner of Oakwood apartments in Mount Dora tried to charge seven families almost $3,000 each for extermination fees.

The South Florida based company, Miami Mar Incorporated, told the residents they would be kicked out if they didn’t pay.

Whether this is fair, or legal, is one question.

Whether asking low-income tenants to come up with that kind of money for treatment is practical is an easy “no.”

But HUD had other ideas:

The U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development [HUD] helps pay the rent at the complex for people who can’t afford it. After Eyewitness News contacted HUD, the agency told the landlord extermination is an operating expense that the tenants don’t have to pay for.

Watch WFTV’s video at Residents Told To Pay For Bed Bug Infestation – News Story – WFTV Orlando.Similar Posts:

• Status of New Jersey bed bug extermination bill A3203: so far so good

A new article from Baltimore’s City Paper is troubling.

Landlords in Baltimore who rent out single-family homes are not responsible for treating for bed bugs in those homes, even if the “single-family home” is a kind of unofficial rooming-house with fifteen or more residents. As you may guess, the residents may also lack the funds to treat their homes for bed bugs. (Owners of multi-family units are responsible for treatment for bed bugs, though many are finding this extremely challenging, both financially, as well as because bed bugs are just really hard to get rid of.)

Many people in Baltimore, including Mark Adams, who is profiled in this article, attribute the “cause” of bed bugs to their neighbors’ Latino/a ethnicity. And this is where it starts to get ugly.

The bottom line is that if your neighbors have bed bugs and do not get proper treatment, you will probably get bed bugs, and you will not be able to get rid of them.
This is true whatever your neighbors’ ethnicity, country of origin, religion, or economic class.

The real problem here is that no one is required to treat these single-family homes for bed bugs.

Edward Ericson, Jr. writes for City Paper, that

in the southeastern Baltimore City neighborhoods of Butchers Hill, Upper Fells Point, Fells Prospect, and Highlandtown, the [bed bug] trouble has often attached itself to and spread out from de facto rooming houses filled with extended families and working men.

And

The Baltimore City Health Department itself acknowledges the correlation, though not the causation, in a “Bed Bug Response Plan” it quietly released on April 20. “Pest control companies and the Hispanic Apostolate noted the pronounced bed bug problem in the Latino community, perhaps due to travel and frequent relocations,” the plan notes.

Asked during a June 8 phone conversation to expand on that observation, three Baltimore Health Department officials say nothing for several seconds. “I think that’s where we’ve seen a fair amount of our complaints coming in,” Interim Commissioner Olivia Farrow finally says, speaking of the Latino community. But she and others stress, bed bugs are not confined to the Hispanic population.

“Bed bugs don’t discriminate,” says Sarah Norman, chief of the city Lead, Asthma and Injury Prevention bureau. “All they care about is whether you’re alive.”

Anyone who doubts this should spend some time on our Bedbugger Forums. Although most posters are anonymous, you do get a sense of the diversity of ethnic, national, and socio-economic backgrounds represented.

However, let’s leave aside habits of “travel and frequent relocations,” for a moment and consider the fact that the residents of this single-family row-house are likely unable to pay for their own bed bug treatment. They may lack information about bed bugs and how difficult they are to treat. They may not know where to get help (if, indeed, there is anywhere to get help.)

The city rightly acknowledges that the bed bug blame game does not work:

In a four-way telephone conversation on June 8, city health officials explain that fixing blame for a given infestation is effectively beyond the ken of local government. “We do get a lot of bedbugs going from place to place,” Sarah Norman says. “The difficulty is verifying. Do they have some evidence?”

“You have to get into both properties,” Olivia Farrow adds. “It’s a lengthy investigation.”

Add to that gaps in the city’s laws that make the owners of multi-family dwellings responsible for pest eradication, but don’t obligate the owners of single-family houses to fumigate, no matter how many people are living there, and code-enforcement appears to be a non-starter–at least where the Health Department is concerned.

“So the real thing is education,” Norman says. “What we do is we knock on the door and we really try to create a relationship with the neighbors.”

The Health Department is currently trying to snare federal grants that might, if they come through, help at least some of the city’s low-income families shoulder the cost of eradicating bed-bug infestations. “We are hoping to make a national model about how this kind of thing can be done,” Kasameyer says at the June 16 community meeting.

(Emphasis mine.)

That’s good news. Please make it happen quickly.

The bottom line is that — since the cost of bed bug treatment in Baltimore lies with them — single-family home tenants and small-scale multi-unit landlords may need help in paying for treatment. They also need to educate residents and enforce treatment of those single-family homes.

Baltimore clearly needs affordable, effective pest control to be available to everyone.

And when bed bugs are spreading from row-house to row-house, it really could soon be everyone who has them.

Be sure to check out the article, and the interesting link to a map of bed bug infestations reported to Baltimore’s 311 since 2006.

Update (7/2):

Compare this story from ABC: “Southeast Baltimore Infested with Bed Bugs”

What a difference it makes when the focus is on neighborhoods.

Similar Posts:

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Mark Sheperdigian has a new brief — but important — article in Pest Management Professional, about the limits of bed bug inspections.

The author is stating truisms known to those who know bed bugs — not radical new insights.  And yet it is crucial for the pest management professional working on bed bug cases both to understand these facts — and to communicate them to their customers.

First, Sheperdigian comments on the difficulty of knowing whether a unit is infested:

We can discover with 100 percent certainty that an account is infested; we cannot discover with 100 percent certainty that it is not.

This is the most frustrating factor for people who think they have bed bugs.  Many will spend hundreds of dollars in human and canine scent detection and still have no certainty whether they have bed bugs.

Sometimes people feel they have hired a lousy PCO or dog team; sometimes that is so, but the truth is: bed bugs are stealthy and hard to detect.  That’s just how Sneaky Simes rolls. And so, Sheperdigian suggests, the key is for bed bug pros to communicate the difficulty of detection.

And Sheperdigian reminds us that “Most infestations are established before they are discovered,” and

This also means that in a multiple-unit dwelling situation such as apartments and senior housing, the units reporting bed bugs are only a portion of the problem. Therefore, a program that begins by treating only units that have reported bed bugs is treating only a portion of the problem. There are almost always units that have a light infestation unbeknownst to the tenants — and units that have heavier infestations unreported by the tenants.

Perhaps that is the one piece of information I wish all tenants and landlords knew. People tend to complain about bed bugs if they see them, or if they react to bed bug bites — and even then, they will often hesitate while they explore other possible causes (and in some cases, until they hear for the first time that bed bugs exist!)

When tenants or landlords assume that only those who have complained about bed bugs have bed bugs, we can forgive their ignorance of just how bed bugs work.

The problem is that pest management professionals who know bed bugs should know that there are almost always other infested units.

We hear some PCOs insist customers pay for inspection of adjacent units and/or all of a building’s units.

We hear others try to encourage this but are understandably ignored by customers who just don’t get it, or just can’t afford it.  Many of the latter will treat the isolated unit anyway.  Only later, it may become fully apparent to the homeowner, tenant, or landlord that this was not enough to get rid of bed bugs in the unit.

Frankly, I think Boston is on to the only possible solution for this problem; the Boston Inspectional Services Department requires landlords to treat all horizontally and vertically adjacent units and inspect the entire building.

Few landlords do this voluntarily.  And many buildings end up with seriously chronic bed bug problems.

Here, as in his previous articles on bed bugs, I appreciate Mark Sheperdigian’s knowledge and wisdom.  All in all, these are important issues that bed bug professionals and customers need to be aware of.

I know you will want to read the full article: “Know Your Limits in Bed Bug Inspection” at Pest Management Professional.

Thanks to Renee for the tip!Similar Posts:

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• 160-unit Richmond, California complex evacuated for tent fumigation of bed bugs
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