New York Gets Technical To Eliminate Rats .. Starting In Bronx
Juan Cardenas was tossing his trash into a garbage can in his Bronx apartment last summer when something suddenly appeared on his arm. It wasn’t a loose piece of trash _ it was a rat.
“I was traumatized,” said Cardenas, 21. “I screamed and ran.”
Cardenas is just one of the millions of New Yorkers who have been terrorized by the red-eyed rodents. But help could soon be on the way.
The city Health Department recently launched a program in the Bronx in which inspectors equipped with hand-held computers canvass neighborhoods in search of evidence of rat infestations. They will then develop a neighborhood rodent profile to better target infestations.
“No one wants to live in a neighborhood with a serious rat problem,” said Dan Kass, who worked on designing the program. “They are capable of contaminating food supplies. They damage utility pipes and electrical wires.”
As homeowners get more desperate, the insurance industry is bracing for an increase in arson.
By Jon Birger, senior writer
NEW YORK (Fortune) — Faced with foreclosure on her Russellville, Indiana home, Christina Snyder allegedly concocted the kind of plan that now has insurance executives on edge.
According to the county prosecutor, the 31-year-old Snyder allegedly offered to pay a neighbor $5,000 to help her burn down her house and make it look like a botched rape attempt - all in order to claim $80,000 in insurance money. Snyder wanted the neighbor to bind her hands in duct tape, write “whore” on her shirt, and then help her escape once the blaze was set, the prosecutor says. The neighbor demurred, instead reporting Snyder to police.
With the national foreclosure rate zooming and the real estate market in a two-year funk, the insurance industry fears more homeowners will see arson as a way out of their financial woes. A recent report by the industry-funded Coalition Against Insurance Fraud notes that with “untold thousands of homeowners struggling with ballooning subprime mortgage payments, fraud fighters are watching closely for a spike in arsons by desperate homeowners who can no longer afford their home payments.”
Under a new law, at least 2,000 stores across the city will be required to set up in-store recycling for plastic bags. The legislation, passed yesterday by the City Council, covers stores with at least 5,000 square feet and chain stores with five or more locations.
The affected stores will have to offer cloth or reusable plastic bags to customers, set up recycling drop offs for the disposable plastic bags in each store and print information onto those bags about how to recycle them. The stores must bring the bags to recycling centers themselves; the Sanitation Department is not involved.
Fines for non-compliance range from $300 to $1,500 per day.
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