‘A miserable experience’: Rats overwhelming Old Ottawa East street

Swimming in toilets, scurrying through backyards and even interfering with a local badminton game — rats are once again plaguing part of the city, this time on one street in Old Ottawa East. 

Like people in several communities across Ottawa, Jamie Brougham and his neighbours have been dealing with the rats since the summer.

He would walk out to his bird feeder, look down off his deck and see them congregating below it.

That’s when he began to lay traps. 

“[I caught] probably six, and I got one with a shovel, which was kind of gross. But the worst part was once you catch them,” he said. “That is a miserable experience.”

CBC spoke to Brougham and several other neighbours about the rat problem, which has included rodents running back and forth on the street in broad daylight.

In one instance, they watched multiple rats speed through their September street party.  In another, one neighbour saw them scurry alongside their kids’ badminton game.

But that wasn’t the worst of it.

Bathroom break-in

In early September, one neighbour had a rat come up through their toilet. They recalled seeing its tail swaying in the bowl before it swam back into the pipes.

Since then, many neighbours on the street have joined forces to try to get rid of the pests.

“We decided we’re going to stop feeding the birds,” Brougham said. “[And] you have to be careful with your compost.”

Seven residents also called the city in mid-September, he added.

“There were a number of people who were concerned,” said Brougham. “And some were quite freaked out, you know, understandably.”

Baiting the sewers

Within the week, bylaw showed up at their street near Brantwood Park, he said, to inspect the rat situation. 

In an earlier infestation this year at a Kanata rowhouse, bylaw officers warned one of the residents to take care of the problem themselves.

But this time, the City of Ottawa is taking a different approach: it’s baiting the city-owned sanitary sewers. 

That’s only done as “a last resort when rat activity is detected within the sewer system” as it has “very limited effectiveness and only works in specific cases,” according to a statement attributed to Marilyn Journeaux, the city’s director of water linear and customer services.

On Sept. 27, the city said they’d set out the poisonous bait. They said they’ve been checking up on the sewers every two weeks since to see if rats are still scurrying around.

In the latest checkup, rat movement was detected, the city said — although Brougham said he hasn’t seen any rodents since the bait went out.

On Saturday, Brougham shared a photo with CBC of a dead rat on his lawn.

“What the city did with the baiting and the sewers, they actually brought a hydrovac truck and they cleaned the sewer out and then they put the bait in there. And since that time, we haven’t seen them,” Brougham said. 

“So that was three to four weeks ago and I haven’t seen them since. So that’s really encouraging … the city handled it very well.”

The sewers will continue to be baited until there is little to no rat activity for a month, the city said. 

Education efforts

But River ward Coun. Riley Brockington said the weight of the citywide rat issue shouldn’t just lie on the municipality’s shoulders. 

“People question what the city is doing. It’s a fair, fair question. But at the end of the day, this is a team effort, and until everyone is working together and we particularly eliminate food sources, we will not solve this,” said Brockington, whose efforts led to the recent revival of the city’s rat mitigation working group.

Composed of staff from various city departments, the group is designed to address Ottawa’s growing rat problem.

It tries to educate people about how to keep rat numbers down, Brockington said, while also taking small preventive measures like converting trash cans in parks to containers that can only be opened by humans.

“A lot of the preaching to the public is about [how people should] not put out pet food, not put out bird seed at this time of year, pick up all fallen fruit from trees — anything that rats can get into,” Brockington said. 

“The prevalence of food availability is what’s killing us in the city, and the solution’s right there in front of us.”