Some neighborhood residents in Michigan did not celebrate Halloween this year as the city forbade the essential part of the celebrations, trick or treating, on their street. The street was closed off to the public because of a cockroach infestation.
The neighborhood in the city of Wyandotte, south of Detroit, had been experiencing a severe cockroach invasion. City officials decided to shut down a street in the community to prevent the cockroaches from taking over the entire area.
Officials sent a letter to close off a portion of 20th street to prevent the annoying bugs from spreading to other houses.
Wyandotte city officials said the city was trying its best to solve the roach problem but urged residents to be patient as it could take quite a while to eradicate the cockroaches.
One of the residents of the closed street, Lisa Labean, who lives next to the house where the cockroaches originated said the condition was dire.
She added that when I sleep, “I feel like something is crawling on my skin.” She showed a local news outlet several pictures exhibiting numerous cockroaches roaming the neighborhood. Labean said she has watched the roaches move from the infested house to hers for several months.
Another neighbor, Tony Vargo, who lives across from the infested house, said that sanitation workers discovered the horrible situation on August 12 when trash collectors stopped by a home on the street on a typical garbage collection day.
The garbage collector threw a bag of trash he had taken from the home into the back of the truck and noticed a lot of movement in the trash bag. He opened the bag to find it filled with roaches.
The sanitation workers reported the situation to the police, who went to the house for a wellness check. They were shocked at the conditions they found in the home and deemed the house not livable.
According to Labean, when the police did their checkup, they found children living in the house and roaches crawling all over them on the couch.
The homeowners moved out of the house shortly after the wellness check. Authorities asked them to wrap their things and bring them outside, so the sanitation officials could spray them with medicine to kill the roaches. The owners failed to wrap their things up as instructed, causing the bugs to spread throughout the street.
The city will spray every yard in the neighborhood. They canceled Halloween celebrations on the street to prevent roaches from getting on kids’ Halloween costumes and spreading throughout the city.
The City of Wyandotte issued a statement saying they had been made aware of the roach situation on 20th Street and had decided to close off the street. The city shut down the sidewalks from Eureka to Grove for several hours on Monday, October 31.
Robert DeSana, the Wyandotte mayor, said that the city would spray insecticide on lawns, along sidewalks, on the street, and in the curb lines of affected areas. He reassured residents that the city was taking all legal measures to deal with the problem.
