by Julia O'Malley
At a low-rate motel on the edge of Spenard recently, I noticed a guy smoking outside who was covered with scabs. Initially, I thought he might have a disease. Then I realized it was probably bed-bug bites. That was, after all, why I was there.
It took me four months to get Randy Beuter, who owns Eagle Pest Control, to take me out with him and his bedbug-sniffing dog, Rudolph. It wasn't because he didn't want to take me. It was because the places with the bed bugs didn't want any witnesses.
Beuter himself enjoys the limelight. You might recognize his salt-and-pepper bowl cut and gravelly voice from the television news. His consistent message: creeping bed-bug catastrophe is poised to envelop the city.
"It's like a tidal wave," Beuter told me. "And you're trying to tell people to get out of the way, it's coming. And now it's rolling up the beach."
Bed-bug complaints are on the rise in Anchorage, according to municipal and state health departments. The bugs usually don't transfer illnesses and have not be identified as a public health issue. For that reason, there aren't lots of resources focused on them. Exterminators across the city backed Beuter's claim. They told me the bugs used to generate a call or two a year; now they bring several calls a week.
I heard stories from them about bugs at high-end hotels and subsidized housing, Hillside palaces and trailers, dorms, schools and health-care facilities. None would say exactly where. Sometimes they are asked to arrive at odd hours, they said, or park their vans where they can't be seen from the street. A bedbug rumor at a hotel can cost a lot of money. Discretion is the better part of pest management. All the secrecy is probably one reason the problem isn't really on the public's radar.
"It's a dirty secret, but if people could only see it's not about how cleanly you are," Beuter said. "The more vigilant people can be when they check in to hotels and notice strange bites, the better."
I wound up at the Spenard motel because I'd been observing Beuter for a couple of weeks and we'd been skunked every time. I hadn't seen a bug, nor had I seen his dog give a positive response. The hotel was supposed to be a hot zone. It was where Beuter went when he needed sample bugs to train the dog.
At a low-rate motel on the edge of Spenard recently, I noticed a guy smoking outside who was covered with scabs. Initially, I thought he might have a disease. Then I realized it was probably bed-bug bites. That was, after all, why I was there.
It took me four months to get Randy Beuter, who owns Eagle Pest Control, to take me out with him and his bedbug-sniffing dog, Rudolph. It wasn't because he didn't want to take me. It was because the places with the bed bugs didn't want any witnesses. Beuter himself enjoys the limelight. You might recognize his salt-and-pepper bowl cut and gravelly voice from the television news. His consistent message: creeping bed-bug catastrophe is poised to envelop the city.
"It's like a tidal wave," Beuter told me. "And you're trying to tell people to get out of the way, it's coming. And now it's rolling up the beach."
Bed-bug complaints are on the rise in Anchorage, according to municipal and state health departments. The bugs usually don't transfer illnesses and have not be identified as a public health issue. For that reason, there aren't lots of resources focused on them. Exterminators across the city backed Beuter's claim. They told me the bugs used to generate a call or two a year; now they bring several calls a week.
I heard stories from them about bugs at high-end hotels and subsidized housing, Hillside palaces and trailers, dorms, schools and health-care facilities. None would say exactly where. Sometimes they are asked to arrive at odd hours, they said, or park their vans where they can't be seen from the street. A bedbug rumor at a hotel can cost a lot of money. Discretion is the better part of pest management. All the secrecy is probably one reason the problem isn't really on the public's radar.
"It's a dirty secret, but if people could only see it's not about how cleanly you are," Beuter said. "The more vigilant people can be when they check in to hotels and notice strange bites, the better."
I wound up at the Spenard motel because I'd been observing Beuter for a couple of weeks and we'd been skunked every time. I hadn't seen a bug, nor had I seen his dog give a positive response. The hotel was supposed to be a hot zone. It was where Beuter went when he needed sample bugs to train the dog.
