Swarms of termites are breeding paranoia in the Davidson Residence Halls on Busch Campus.
On some nights depending on the weather, Rutgers College junior Shaneze Gayle said she shines a flashlight in her room to see if insects are teeming from ventilation ducts and holes in the wall before going inside.
"I know whether it will be a swarm day or not," she said. "We can feel the termites…everybody's knocking on doors, everybody warns each other, 'there's termites today, watch out, watch out.' Everybody's on the lookout."
Gayle's two-month-long ordeal with the wood-consuming bugs has left her disenchanted with the University, which until recently did little to halt the pests' long-term progress.
"Housing just doesn't care about Davidson," she said. "It's not like it's an ant or a fly, it's a termite. They're eating the ground under us as we speak."
Her first encounter with the insects was in early March as the weather began getting warm. She said she was in class when her boyfriend sent her a text message, suspecting gnats had taken up residence in her room.
Around the same time across the hall, Christine Bui thought flies were massing in the residence hall. The Ernest Mario School of Pharmacy junior said she saw what looked like hundreds of ants with wings crawling on the ground.
"I was shocked," she said. "It looked like the floor was moving."
Bui said the winged pests turned out to be a class of termite that comes up from the ground to mate and reproduce before returning to the soil where the brood's workers maintain a colony.
Bui emailed University President Richard L. McCormick and Joan Carbone, the executive director of residence life. On April 4, Gregory Blimling, the vice president for student affairs, responded to let her know that Lawrenceville-based Cooper Pest Solutions had injected the ground with a substance to kill the termites and render the soil sterile for the next several generations.
But in reality, the ground was only injected this past Wednesday and the pest-control visit that Blimling referred to was one of several short-term measures to slow the termites by spraying residence hall rooms with boric acid, Bui said.
"When Cooper came that day, it was only for that temporary spray," she wrote in an email to Blimling. "We spoke to [the Cooper employee] and he even said Cooper Pest solutions was waiting for something from housing and that he didn't know when the actual ground treatment would happen."
The associate director of housing operations Steve Dubiago blamed the discrepancy on a miscommunication and said the reason boric acid was sprayed in Bui's room had to do with New Jersey pesticide control regulations, which are aimed at reducing the use of chemicals while limiting the damage caused by pests.
He said before any work could begin underground, the University first had to apply for a permit and ensure that no gas or electrical lines would be hit in the process.
Gayle said she was hoping the problem would finally be resolved with the new effort that began this week so that her own ad-hoc efforts would no longer be necessary.
In the interim, she had developed tactics to battle the insects.
"We take bug spray to spray them because it temporarily immobilizes them and that's when you vacuum them up," she said.
Gayle has not seen the termites in awhile but said her primary concern now is that the pest treatment might cause the remaining termites to procreate more rapidly in order to replenish their diminished colony.
