Rodent Removal in Meyerland

Meyerland has two kinds of houses now, and rats reach each of them by a different route. The subdivision was laid out in 1955 on 1,200 acres of former fields, and the original stock is the mid-century ranch house on a slab, in the Tudor, colonial and contemporary variations the neighborhood is known for. Since Harvey a large share of those houses have been lifted several feet on new piers or torn down and rebuilt above base flood elevation, which the Houston Chronicle put at roughly 136 elevated originals by 2022 with new builds going up higher still.

An original ranch on its slab is a suburban-style exclusion job. There is no crawl space, so the Norway rat works the slab edge, the garage corners and the utility penetrations, and the roof rat comes down out of the live oaks onto a low hip or gable roof and tests the soffit-to-brick joint, the vent boots and the mushroom vents. The roofs are low and the eaves are long, which makes the inspection easy and the entries plentiful.

A raised house is a different animal. Lifting a slab house five to ten feet puts an open void under the whole floor, and the new skirting, lattice or masonry infill around that void is the first thing to check. Openings a rat can pass are anything half an inch or larger, and a quarter inch is the standard UF/IFAS gives for rat-proofing, so a skirting panel that fits within a finger of the pier is a door. New utility runs up through the raised floor add penetrations that the original house never had. The rodent exclusion work on a raised Meyerland house starts under the floor and moves up.

Meyerland is inside the City of Houston and Harris County, so the contractor we route holds the Texas Department of Agriculture license that covers rats and mice, and the TPCL number should be on the truck.

Brays Bayou is why rats in Meyerland are a recurring problem and why they spike after every high-water event. The bayou runs east-northeast straight through the neighborhood on its way under the 610 Loop, and part of Meyerland lies inside the 100-year floodplain. The Memorial Day flood of 2015 put water from Brays into more than 400 Meyerland homes. The Tax Day flood came in 2016. Harvey in 2017 was worse than either, and by the Chronicle's count about 17 percent of the original mid-century houses have never flooded at all.

Norway rats burrow in bayou banks and storm drain margins, and a bayou that leaves its banks empties those burrows. The animals move uphill to the nearest dry cover, which on a Meyerland street is a garage, a raised-house void or an attic. Houston pest firms reported to local news after Harvey that rodents moved into attics in numbers they had never seen. The CDC ties increases in leptospirosis to hurricanes and floods, lists rodents among the reservoirs, and recommends rodent control as part of post-flood prevention, which is a sober reason to have the house checked after the water goes down. A post-storm rodent inspection is built for exactly that week.

Project Brays, the federal widening and deepening of 21 miles of the bayou with new detention basins, has changed the banks along Meyerland. Cleared, regraded banks hold fewer burrows than the old brushy ones, and a wider channel means the bank is further from the back fence. It has moved rodent pressure without removing it. The animals that lived in the old bank now live in the fence lines, the drainage easements and under whatever sheds survived.

A Meyerland rodent job runs inspection first, sealing and trapping together, then a return visit, and on a flood-damaged house it often adds attic or under-floor cleanup. The free inspection covers the roofline, the slab edge or the raised-floor void, the garage and the attic, and produces an itemized quote with sealing, trapping, cleanup and any return visits on separate lines.

Trapping and sealing run as one program. Snap traps go on the dropping runs the same day the openings are closed and stay at least a week, because UF/IFAS notes roof rats avoid new objects for several days. HomeGuide puts a small trapping job at two to three days and a heavy infestation at one to two months, and sealing on the first visit is what keeps a Meyerland house at the short end. The rat removal page lays out the trapping side and the case against poison in a house with walls that have already been opened once for flood repair.

People who call from Meyerland have often been through a flood, a rebuild and a rat problem in that order, and the sleep loss is real by the time they pick up the phone. Whoever attends takes the noise in the ceiling as seriously as the water on the floor. Use the contact page or the number above to book the inspection.