The Cities: Rats’ Alley

I think we are in rats’ alley Where the dead men lost their bones. . .

—T. S. Eliot, The Waste Land

Texarkana (pop. 60,000) is a Texas farm town that sprawls across the Arkansas border and serves assorted crooks as a distribution center for stolen cars and appliances. Now the city boasts a new source of notoriety: 17 of Texarkana’s 24 sq. mi., including some of the better sections, are infested with sleek, fat rats. According to U.S. Interior Department investigators, the town harbors about 900,000 of the rodents—30 times the national average of one rat per two citizens.

By gnawing holes in buildings and contaminating food, Texarkana’s rats cause about $3 million of damage a year. With their eleven internal parasites and 18 kinds of fleas, they expose people to rat-bite fever, murine typhus, bubonic plague and other diseases. Yet the city’s residents have become appallingly adapted to the rats. As one retired Negro farmer casually puts it: “They play like ants behind my house.”

Many of the people of Texarkana are technologically unemployed farmhands who have no conception of sanitation. They persist in tossing their garbage out the back door without remembering that rats, not hogs, are there to eat it. Worse, the city did not collect trash until last week and is still unable to enforce its rudimentary sanitation laws; much of the population cannot afford even minimal fines. As a result, vacant lots have sprouted moldering mountains of rubber tires, empty cans, cardboard boxes and putrefying scraps of food. The rats love it.

No Pied Piper. Part of the problem is political. Because the city straddles the state line, it has separate mayors in Texas and Arkansas, two district city councils and health departments. To fight rats effectively, both city governments obviously have to cooperate. But the Texas side of town has budgeted only $4,000 for rat control while Arkansas begrudges $1,500. Says Doyle Purifoy, in charge of the Arkansas program: “We’ve got the rats on the run.” Presumably to Texas.

“People here just don’t give a damn,” sighs W. T. Westbrook, sanitation director of Bowie County (Texas). He cares, but is clearly no Pied Piper. When he arrived on the fetid scene two years ago, he personally showed community leaders the filth, started keeping count of rat-bite victims and battled city hall for revisions in the sanitation code. All in vain. So he organized his own two-man rat patrol.

Every morning at 8, the patrol sallies forth in an old black hearse to kill rats with fluoroacetamide poison, calcium cyanide and .22 pistols. “It’s an impossible job,” says Westbrook. “The gestation period for rats is 21 days. A healthy female has a litter of twelve every four weeks. We have to kill constantly just to keep pace.” The real solution lies in cleaning up the city and training residents to make their homes unfit for vermin. Westbrook is not optimistic. “Even if we had strict sanitation laws, it’s doubtful that people would obey them,” he says. “People around here are not accustomed to obeying laws.”