Termites swarm in Busch residence halls
Dmitry Sheynin / Associate News Editor
Issue date: 4/18/08 Section: Page One
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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.