Feb 12, 2009 11:02 pm US/Central
No Easy Fix To Clean 'Roach-Infested' Apartments
ST. PAUL (WCCO) ―
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Complaints to the city of St. Paul about the cockroaches started back in 2004. Redeemers Arms is the non-profit organization who owns the 150-unit building. Its apartments are reserved for people with disabilities.
CBS
For John Ives, it seems like cockroaches have taken over his studio apartment at the Redeemers Arms in St. Paul. They are under his couch, behind his light fixtures and near his dog food. He said he changes his sticky traps almost every day.
"It's cleaner to live outside than it is inside Redeemers Arms with the cockroaches. I'm sleep in bed at nighttime, they cruise across my face," Ives said.
He said he and his neighbors have been dealing with cockroaches in the building for years. Complaints to the city of St. Paul about the cockroaches started back in 2004. Redeemers Arms is the non-profit organization who owns the 150-unit building. Its apartments are reserved for people with disabilities.
Ives said he's complained to the city of St. Paul and to the managers at Redeemers Arms, but the cockroaches still stick around.
Redeemers Arms spokesman Doug Strandness said the organization has been actively working to get rid of the bugs.
"I guess I would regard it as an ongoing, serious nuisance. Not an issue of habitability but something we recognize as a problem and something that we address on an ongoing basis and are constantly looking for new and different ways to deal with it," he said.
Late last year, Strandness said Redeemers Arms took a big, new step to address the cockroach problem. Before that, they had been treating it more traditionally on a case-by-case basis.
Strandness said Redeemers Arms has spent more than $8,000 in the past four months with Orkin. That included an intense five-week series of the whole building, floor by floor. Now, he said, Orkin comes once a week and any resident can ask for the service.
"The feedback we got from residents was that it made a large and noticeable difference, however we don't think the problem is solved," said Strandness.
He said the building has two major things working against controlling the cockroaches. It's old and airy with lots of spaces between the walls for the cockroaches to roam.
Its residents are also lower-income with physical and mental disabilities. The building manager said about 60 percent of the people who live in the building are formerly homeless and often bring the bugs with them when they move in.
Bill Gunther is the Environmental Health Manager for the city of St. Paul and a semi-expert in cockroaches. He said once a building is infected, it's hard to get rid of the insects. Gunther said the only way would be to close the building for a week and fumigate.
"If this were Park Avenue, or something else like that, it would be easy to control. But with a transient population, bringing them in all the time, nope, you're going to have an occasional cockroach problem," Gunther said.
Last year, the city checked out three cockroach complaints at the building. They told the managers to bring in professional help to deal with the problem. City inspectors said they believe Redeemers Arms is aggressively addressing the problem.
Strandness said Redeemers Arms is raising $6 million to renovate the entire building in a year and a half. He said closing up the open spaces and replacing the appliances will make it easier to contain the cockroaches to a single apartment in the future.
(© MMIX, CBS Broadcasting Inc. All Rights Reserved.)
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