Residents Voice Infestation Concerns

Amidst wrangling over potential construction slowdowns at last week’s Allston-Brighton neighborhood task force meeting, one resident asked the group to turn its attention to a specific concern: a local rat infestation that some residents say has resulted from excavation work at Harvard’s planned Allston Science Complex.

“Are you at least going to tell us about all the rats that have come out of the hole and since infested our neighborhood?” asked Jake Carman, founder of the Allston Brighton Neighborhood Assembly, to boisterous applause. “Can you all have the Harvard Corporation and the President come down next time so we can actually find out what’s going on in our neighborhood?”

But Harvard’s director of community relations Kevin A. McCluskey ’76 said in an interview that the connection between Harvard’s excavation and the influx of rats was tenuous, and that the University employs a “very aggressive and thorough pre-construction program” that anticipated rodent displacement from the work site. He also pointed out that an explanation for the rat influx might be the failure of community members to dispose of trash properly in rat-proof garbage bins.

But Carman said that—to his knowledge—city officials have examined the rat situation near the construction site, but have not worked in North Brighton to quell the infestation—which he says is a phenomenon that greatly increased in scale following the excavation work.

Harvard broke ground on the science complex—its only Allston expansion initiative approved thus far—in 2008.

“I can tell you that I moved [to North Brighton] in September of 2007 and we had not a single rat on our street, we only had bunny rabbits on our streets,” Carman said. “Now it’s covered in rats. Nowadays, you can walk from my house to North Harvard Street and you’ll see 10 live rats if it’s late enough at night.”

Carman said his organization will soon send out flyers and go door-to-door in the neighborhood to discuss ways to mitigate the rat infestation.

Gary D. Alpert, Harvard’s entomology officer of environmental health and safety, said that “the bottom line is the rats are [the community’s rats], not Harvard’s,” and that the University and city have worked to control potential rat issues both nearby the construction site and in surrounding neighborhoods.

Alpert—who is co-leader of a project that started over a year ago to make Allston a “rat-free zone”—added that by creating outreach programs to educate community members and to provide rat-proof trash containers, Harvard has been “trying to be good neighbors” and actually “went out of [its] way” to rid a local church of rats.

“If [residents] see rats, they should be complaining to Boston Inspectional Services,” Alpert said.

Some Allston residents, including Task Force members Ray Mellone and John Cusack, agreed that the University and city have made a substantial effort to deal with the rat issue, and that responsible trash disposal is key.

“The University was not at fault if there was any type of infestation,” said Mellone, who added that he has not noticed a growing rat problem. “I don’t think it’s anything except sour grapes on the part of people who like to raise issues. [The complaints] are way out of proportion to what is going on.”

—Staff writer Vidya B. Viswanathan can be reached at viswanat@fas.harvard.edu.

—Staff writer Peter F. Zhu can be reached at pzhu@fas.harvard.edu.