Surveying a leafy cul-de-sac in Stanford, Mikail Price pronounced it a rat “heaven.”
Price is the South Bay branch manager for the pest management company Pestec, which has serviced the ring of wooden houses for more than five years. The company sets traps, seals entry points and deploys green cubes of poison. But it’s been increasingly difficult to keep the rats at bay: in the la)st year, Price said, Pestec has had to up its twice-monthly rounds of the community to once a week.
During a recent visit, exterminators pulled dead rats from roughly two-thirds of their traps — flat black boxes loaded with bait and placed outside the homes. One resident leaned over the railing of her deck and called down that her dog had sniffed out rats in her home’s crawlspace…