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SMHA addresses bed bug issue

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By Kelly Mori, Staff Writer 5:44 PM Friday, August 28, 2009

SPRINGFIELD — The bed bugs that have infested some Cole Manor apartments didn’t appear overnight and they won’t go away overnight either, Springfield Metropolitan Housing Authority Executive Director Barbara Stewart said Friday, Aug. 28.

Still, SMHA is trying to get rid of them as fast as they can, she said.

Since Aug. 15, when a ninth-floor apartment and its resident were found covered with the blood sucking bugs, 23 of Cole Manor’s 152 apartments have been treated by an exterminator, Stewart said. Another 23 apartments at SMHA’s Hugh Taylor apartments have been treated.

“What we are doing is treating apartments that have active bugs and then we’re treating the apartments on either side,” she said. SMHA is covering the cost of the exterminations.

“It’s getting pretty expensive,” she said.

SMHA is also ordering mattress covers for any resident who requests them.

That’s not enough, said resident Lora McGee, one of several residents who have been picketing outside of the apartment complex since Wednesday Aug. 27.

“They just need to close this place down and fumigate,” she said. “What good are mattress covers? The bugs are just going to hatch inside them. Then what’s going to happen? “

McGee and Tina Dixon, who has also been picketing in front of the complex, have yet to have bugs in their apartments, but they’re worried that a piecemeal approach to attacking the problem will only cause the bugs to scatter into other apartments.

“I’m scared to death I’m going to get them,” Dixon said. “I have no other place to go.”

The two women are going from apartment to apartment and gathering signatures for a petition to SMHA to “clean up this place.” Dixon said.

Contact this reporter at (937) 328-0347 or kmori@coxohio.com.

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