We are currently located in Maria Hernandez Park which is this square here and the entire area is infested with rats.
Christian Cotrina shows us on the city map how several blocks of Bushwick are infested with rats. Then he shows us food waste and rodent holes.
Cotrina opened an Instagram account where neighbors make complaints. Every week he receives between 20 and 30 complaints from neighbors about rats.
“All of Bushwick is infected with rats. You walk all day, morning, afternoon or night and don’t be surprised to see if a rat passes in front of you, ”said Christian Cotrina, Founder Bushwicklife.
From September to October 311 reported nearly 180 rat complaints in this area. Almost double the number of reports made in all of 2020.
In fact, there are streets where although they have signs that the city has already placed substances to exterminate rats, they are still infested.
“Especially on this side that is scary to walk on this side of the street … It’s scary, too many rats there and they are too big,” said a neighbor.
During our tour of the neighborhood we came across several rats.
And it is that on this Menahan street in broad daylight you can perceive sounds of rodent squeals.
“There are rats because there is a lot of food waste, people also do not collaborate.”
For the leader of this district, Samy Olivares, the problem comes from the pandemic, where the city cut more than 100 million to the cleaning department and says that to date they have forgotten this neighborhood.
“It is a problem of environmental racism … That they are not picking up garbage in neighborhoods of poor working class people like Bushwick and hence the rats have been feeding and spreading in an incredible way,” said Olivares.
So far in 2021 the city has registered 14 people with leptospirosis, an infection caused by contact with rodent waste that has even caused one death.
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