The Rats Are Coming

By Sam Allis

The nightmare seems like something out of the Middle Ages: an army of voracious rats emerges from Boston's sewer system, inspiring fear and loathing around the city. The rodents stream past Faneuil Hall, invading the festive food booths of Quincy Market. Soon the rats spread across Boston Common to the Massachusetts statehouse and move into the town houses in tony Back Bay. As panic rises, the assault becomes the biggest threat to the Boston area since Paul Revere warned that the British were coming.

Sound farfetched? Perhaps. But normally unflappable Bostonians consider this apocalyptic vision a real possibility, and it has the city in an uproar. In two years construction is scheduled to begin on the $4.4 billion Central Artery project, the rebuilding of a highway that runs through the heart of downtown Boston. To relocate much of the highway underground, workers will have to excavate 13 million sq. yds. of earth, tearing up countless sewers and other subterranean tunnels. The problem: they are home to untold thousands of the city's rats, one of the largest such colonies in the country. Rudely evicted, the critters will emerge on the surface and start looking around for new homes.

That prospect deeply alarms Bostonians, who think the city already has a big enough rat problem. The rodents roam around Chinatown, and were recently spotted in city hall for the first time in memory. Says Mark Iapicca, who runs a parking lot beneath the elevated Central Artery: "There are already more rats than people around here, and they're bigger than my dog. They're underground now, but what happens when they go aboveground?"

The Norway rat (Rattus norvegicus), which pervades Boston and most American urban areas, is a formidable creature. It has gnawing teeth and jaw muscles that bite with the force of 12 tons per inch -- on a par with a shark. It will eat almost anything, and has been known to attack human babies. Some of the Boston rats have lived their entire lives underground, and no one knows how they will behave when exposed to the cultural opportunities of aboveground Boston.

But Bostonians need not despair. As the city and the state argue over just how the rat peril should be met, the state has hired William B. Jackson, the ultimate rat terminator, to deal with the problem. A former biology professor, Jackson, 62, now runs his own consulting business in Osseo, Mich., and is one of the nation's foremost experts on rodent control. Working for the United Nations, he has battled rats around the world, from Indonesia to Brazil. Billed by the Boston media as the "rat czar" and the "Pied Piper," Jackson is devising a strategy to save Boston by killing off the rats in the 7.5-mile- long Central Artery-construction area even before the work begins.

His main tactic will be to hang poison paraffin blocks from manhole covers in the sewer system. He concedes, though, that he cannot reach other rat tunnels. "The dilemma is that it's not just the sewers," he says, "but a subterranean labyrinth of unknown dimensions." Besides baiting sewers, he will help owners of buildings near the construction create barriers against underground invasions and set traps for rats that venture aboveground. Vows Jackson: "We'll provide them hotel rooms they will never leave."

Jackson's ammunition will be an array of sophisticated rat poisons. His weapon of choice in the sewers will be advanced anticoagulants that can trigger fatal internal bleeding. Other exotic poisons will be used aboveground. For example, one known under the brand name Vengeance, is an antimetabolide that blocks the conversion of food into energy and starves the rat to death.

Many Bostonians are skeptical that mere mortals can defeat the rats. They may be right. Jackson found that the rodents flourished during ten years of atomic testing on Eniwetok atoll in the Marshall Islands. Even if Jackson succeeds in killing off his foes, Boston will still have a serious problem. "Who takes the dead rats?" asks John Sullivan, chief engineer for the Boston water and sewer commission, who maintains that his department will not do that job. "One dead rat a day is one thing, but a whole pile of dead rats every day is another."