Don't let the rats run Boston: Here's how to keep your home and car safe

Beware the rats of Boston. They scamper into your life when they’re least welcome.

Candace Smith, of Allston, was driving 70 mph on the highway when her power steering died. She popped the hood to find the critters had chewed through her car's alternator wires.

Ricky Meinke told WBUR how a rat once died inside his apartment wall, and that his girlfriend found a dead rat in her oven. Rats cut the coolant sensor wires to Jessica Rivilis' SUV during her law school finals. Like Smith, they also live in Allston, nicknamed "Rat City" as a playful riff off its rock music scene and many rodents. (Rock City, Rat City, get it?)

Boston’s dense and lively urban neighborhoods are ideal environments for rats.

Complaints handled by the city of Boston’s top rodent control office soared after the pandemic’s onset, peaking at nearly 5,000 in 2022. Last year’s numbers remained near those levels, suggesting the city’s rat boom may persist.

As climate change brings warmer weather to the area, experts say there’s more opportunity to breed.

Boston’s most common type is the Norway rat, or rattus norvegicus, a native of Asia that lives in urban areas around the world. They can transmit diseases to humans, contaminate food and trigger asthma symptoms. Sanitation workers, unhoused residents living in unsanitary encampments and others who come into close contact with rodents have the highest risk of rat-transmitted disease. However, the risks rats pose to humans are rarely dire.

But they are a nuisance to many — causing property damage, contaminating food they find in your house or leaving droppings and urine on your floor. Sometimes, they snuggle up against the warm engines of recently parked cars and chew on the wires, causing thousands of dollars in damage.

Fortunately, there are ways to protect yourself and your neighbors — short of bringing back "Rat Day," a city-wide event in the early 1900s during which residents caught and exterminated rodents for prizes.

The first thing to remember: Where there’s humans, there’s trash. Where there’s trash, there’s rats. And for a rat, an open dumpster packed with restaurant or household refuse is no dumpster at all. It’s a buffet, said Marieke Rosenbaum, an assistant professor at Tufts University’s Cummings School of Veterinary Medicine.

“It all comes down to the trash. It's their food. So, look for the trash piles and you'll find the rats,” Rosenbaum said.

Damage from rats in homes or cars can cost thousands of dollars to fix — but advice is free. So here are some more recommendations from John Ulrich, an assistant commissioner with Boston’s Inspectional Services Department, and Jim Fredericks, a spokesman with the National Pest Management Association.