The iceman cometh — for the rats.
The city’s Department of Health began using dry ice to kill rats Monday, after a successful 2016 pilot and the Environmental Protection Agency’s approval of the frozen carbon dioxide to kill rodents.
“Rat ice is used in parks primarily because it’s safe — it’s safe, it’s effective and it poses no risk to wildlife such as hawks and birds of prey,” DOH Director of Pest Control Ricky Simeone told reporters Monday at Columbus Park in lower Manhattan.
Simeone was standing beside three holes in the earth of one of the park’s flower beds — burrows, he said, for the rats. Three DOH exterminators, wearing gloves and using metal scoops, filled the holes with little cubes of smoking dry ice — and then buried them. Trapped inside with the dry ice, which turns to carbon dioxide, the rats will suffocate and die.
“Or, nicely put, they go to sleep and they don’t wake up,” Simeone said.
The method works within minutes — though some rats may escape, so the city typically treats an area three times, returning to look for new burrows they might have dug. It can be more effective than using poison.
“In traditional rodenticide that you put in, they may not want it,” he explained. “They’re competing with another food source — they might want the piece of pizza that’s been thrown on the floor.”
It’s also safer — in recent years beloved hawks have been killed after eating rats felled by the poison, including one who died in Columbus Park.
“It was really horrible,” photographer Laura Goggin, who documents hawks in the city, said of the death in Columbus Park. “I think it’s good news especially that the city is exploring alternative methods of rat control other than the poison.”
Before today’s move to use them citywide, the city had tested the method out at parks including Columbus Park, Sara D. Roosevelt on the Lower East Side, and Tompkins Square Park in the East Village — where Goggin said she’d noticed a big difference.
“That park was crawling with rats, they were out during the day, people were complaining there were, you know, as many rats as squirrels,” she recalled. “And the after they used the CO2, there were no rats to be found.”
But there have been other animals — including a possum, she said, whose presence has been quite a novelty.
“That’s good news for the possum,” she said of the nontoxic method.
The city has held three training sessions on using dry ice for staff from the parks department, housing authority, sanitation and education departments — with 33 staffers getting trained. All of those agencies are involved in the city’s neighborhood rat reduction plan.
