By Jenny Welsh
For Gina Miceli, a new apartment was supposed to be a happy start as a college student. A place where memories are made and safe, comfortable nights are spent. Unfortunately, this wasn’t the case for Miceli, a student at USF, when she moved into an off-campus apartment that was infested with bugs.
“I didn’t even want to move my stuff in but by that time it was too late,” Miceli said. “I’m not
from Tampa so it’s not like I could move my stuff back home.”
Miceli and her two roommates had no choice but to move their belongings into their bug-ridden
apartment and hope the maintenance team could get their pest problem under control. They
found this process to be harder than they expected.
“We had this issue where we didn’t want to kill then clean up all of the dead bugs anymore
because the maintenance people would come in and say that we didn’t have a pest problem, then
the next day we would find more bugs.”
Eventually, pest control was brought in to spray the apartment with nontoxic pesticides, but their
bug problems didn’t end.
Barry Watt of Massey Services Pest Control says older apartments like Miceli’s are very hard to
rid of bugs because there may be many generations of infestations.
“The problem with common apartment pests like German cockroaches is that they multiply very
quickly,” Watt said. “They can go through the walls, plumbing, electrical outlets and even from
apartment to apartment as people go see their friends.”
Watt says only way to kill these infestations is to spray a nontoxic bug killer in the places where
the bugs are most likely to be.
“We always want to put it in an area where the bugs are going to be at,” Watt said. “Between the
wall and the cabinet, or where the plumbing penetration is coming through the wall.”
Unfortunately for Miceli and her roommates, one spray was not enough to kill the entire
infestation.
“It’s a sort of residual product, whether it’s a spray or a powder, but that doesn’t mean it will last
forever. Bugs can still find their way into the apartment,” Watts said.
An unnamed employee from an off-campus complex popular with USF students, says it’s up to the tenant to keep their apartment clean and free of bugs.
“From what I’ve seen most of the time, it’s students that just aren’t in the most sanitary or clean,
they don’t clean out their refrigerators or anything like that,” The employee said. “then
sometimes it is like just environmental reasons. It is Florida so when it rains a lot, spiders and like cockroaches do like seek shelter inside, but it is more common to see in an unclean room
than not.”
It is important to note that an apartment’s age does not always mean it will have a bug problem.
“Some of some of our properties that are older, the management staff are continuously being
thorough and cleaning, and so they don’t see very many bug problems,” Watt said. “If one unit
becomes back in, they have a team that goes in there and cleans, paints and gets everything
organized.”
Watt says to keep an apartment free of bugs it’s up to the tenant, property manager, and the pest
control company.
Luckily for Gina Miceli and her roommates, their problems were solved after a couple months of
pest control sprays and keeping their apartment clean of food debris, but her anxiety is still high.
“This apartment just doesn’t really feel like home,” Miceli said. “I’m still scared that every time
I walk in my room or open a cabinet there will be bugs.”
Miceli plans to move once her lease is up in July.