The week following spring break brought some students in the Quad a nasty surprise in the form of bed bugs.
On March 13, a student from the Quad called FIXX, complaining that she had suffered numerous bites while in her room, and upon further investigation, the room was discovered to be home to a number of bed bugs, according to Assistant Director of Residence Life Mark Diodato.
Bed bugs are small nocturnal insects that live by hematophagy, or feeding on the blood of humans.
Standard procedure is that when there is an infestation, the rooms above and below are searched for signs as well, and in that process, two more rooms had signs of the bed bugs. The rooms infested were MacDonald 3001, 3003, and 3004. There was one room with significantly more bugs in it, which was deemed as the source of where the infestation had started.
Once the bugs were contained, pest management sent out samples to be tested to see what kind of infestation was being dealt with, and once it was determined to be bed bugs, the rooms were sprayed down by EcoLab.
Overall, fourteen students were affected by the bed bugs and had to be relocated temporarily while their rooms were sprayed down. The three rooms directly affected were fumigated on March 15 and 16, while the other rooms were sprayed on March 19, because there were students with exams and it was more convenient to wait for the precautionary measures, according to Jerry Faiola, Director of Environmental and Site Services. Six rooms were fumigated on the third level of the building as were all of the second floor rooms. All the rooms were also marked with signs explaining what was happening.
The students had to bag all their clothes and have them cleaned in hot water, as well as move all their belongings into storage, so that the fumigator could get into the baseboards and other crevices easily. Two of the beds in the nine rooms fumigated were discarded because the drawers on the bottom served as a harbor for the bed bugs.
Students were relocated to other areas on campus, or moved in with friends for the few days they weren’t allowed in the rooms. “It was just better that we dealt with the other rooms now rather than have something happen during finals, or a time when it would be really inconvenient,” said Diodato.
