Now that the subways are up and running post-Irene, commuters are getting back into the swing of things, which for some, means a morning spent battling the suffocating smell of GIANT DEAD RATS.
"The smell's horrible," said one commuter at the Parsons/Archer J,Z,E station in Jamaica. "It smells like rotten mice, dead rats. I have to cover my face every day." The smell is apparently the result of various rodents being crushed to death in the station's elevator shaft, after they've fattened up in the station's rather large trash room. A safety inspector with Transport Workers Union Local 100 estimates that 100 or more rats regularly go batshit during the overnight shift, stuffing themselves on ripe trash and freaking out passengers.
The MTA is supposedly working on some new, gruesome-sounding rat trapping techniques, but so far the straphangers at Parsons/Archer aren't seeing the results. Question: do dead rats in the subway smell better or worse than poop in the subway?
