Every morning when library employee Elaine Sakamoto enters her office, the first thing she does is check for rat droppings.
After that, she cleans her whole workspace.
As she walks through the building, every room, she said, has its own unique smell of disinfectant.
Employee concerns at the UCLA Library Kinross South Facility have prompted many to take the same measures as Sakamoto.
The Westwood building has had a rat problem for over a month.
The issue was reported to library management and to UCLA Environmental Health and Safety on Nov. 4. Jeffrey King, an employee who works in the building, said he saw and reported rodent droppings nearly a week before the issue was first addressed.
However, the problem has been dying down, said Joshua Witt, the integrated pest management program manager at the UCLA Environmental Health and Safety office. He said he thinks currently there are probably one or two more rodents in the building that need to be trapped out. Witt added that no reports have been made since Nov. 9.
Sakamoto agrees. She said although the cleaning measures are ongoing, employee concerns have tapered considerably. Initially, Sakamoto said the response time was a key issue; the situation was not dealt with by library administration in a prompt manner.
Prior to Nov. 4, employees were cleaning up their workstations themselves, and many times they used their bare hands, Sakamoto said. Those working in the building, she said, were initially uninformed about the dangers of handling the rodent droppings and urine.
On Nov. 5, any workstations reported to have been in contact with rodent droppings were cleaned, according to Witt. He added that the cleaning was ongoing, with requests being completed within 24 hours.
Witt said that Terminix Pest Control currently comes out four times a week to service and clean the location. He said it was one of their office’s top priorities.
Sakamoto said waiting a day for workstations to be cleaned has been a large problem. She said employees have many times worked in the unclean areas, using Lysol to clean up the rodent droppings or urine.
In response to employee concerns of having to work around rats, Witt said there was a plan to go through and do a full-scale deep cleaning of the entire building once the Environmental Health office is sure the problem has been fully eradicated.
“There is documented evidence that rodents can spread disease, but that doesn’t mean they spread disease every time they walk through somebody’s workplace,” Witt said. “But that doesn’t mean we don’t try to prevent it, or do everything we can to protect their health in that situation.”
King said the problem stemmed from the size of the bureaucracy.
He said reporting procedures have to go through a series of individuals in library administration, and eventually a report gets filed with Environmental Health. Reports are screened through that office, who then can call Terminix.
“In our experience that is usually the problem with pest control, is that someone doesn’t communicate at some point,” Witt said.
When UCLA Environmental Health and Safety was notified of the issue, they worked with Terminix and Facilities Management to seal off potential entry points that rats may have used to get into the building. They also set up traps inside and outside the building.
“We have never, in our professional judgment thought that we need to take measures more than we are taking right now,” Witt said.
Witt advocated a holistic and integrated approach to pest management. This approach includes making sure that all things attracting the rats were removed. One aspect of the plan, he said, was working with building occupants to store food in airtight containers and not eat at workstations.
King said he felt that this was implying that the employees were the ones to blame for the problem.
“The perception that this creates is that they are blaming the victims,” King said. “They say, well it’s your fault because you have a sandwich at your desk at twelve o’clock.”
Deputy University Librarian Susan Parker said the issue was dealt with in a professional and appropriate manner.
Ronald Kieve, a Coalition of University Employees representative and former employee in the Kinross building said the rodent problem was a signal of a larger issue.
The Kinross South Library Facility was built in 1995 as a temporary facility only meant to last 10 years, Kieve said.
“(The building is) basically falling apart. Even if management deals with the rodent infestation and the leaks that occur, they are only dealing with the symptoms, when the real problem is a building that has outlived its lifespan,” Kieve said.
A number of employees currently working in the Kinross building refused to comment because they said they feared retaliation from library management.
The building employees were moved to their current location at the South Kinross Facility three years ago from the A-level of Young Research Library because of ongoing renovations.