NEW YORK — New York City's firefighters do not scare easily, and neither do its rats. But an escalating showdown in a Queens firehouse between these two factions of New York's bravest seems to have been won for the moment by the four-legged team.
The roughly 60 or so humans at the firehouse, which houses Battalion 50 and two other units, tried for months to scare, trap or kill the rats that had begun infesting their building in recent months, but the vermin population only increased.
"It just kept getting bigger and bigger," said David Billig, a spokesman for the Fire Department. Extermination efforts in recent months had failed, he said.
Tuesday, the Fire Department closed the firehouse. Officials announced that the building would be gutted beginning Monday and rebuilt, with luck, within several months. The firefighters and their vehicles will be moved to other firehouses nearby during the demolition and construction.
Tuesday night, outside the building, which began operating as a firehouse in 1960, firefighters loaded equipment into their cars.
Tony Carrion, a sales manager at Nemet Autocenter, a car dealership adjacent to the firehouse, said that heavy construction work at a local subway station chased the rats up to buildings on the block where the firehouse is located.
In the firehouse, the rats had become increasingly bold in recent weeks, moving into the first-floor kitchen, the television lounge, the fire chief's office and equipment storage areas, said Stephen Humenesky, the Queens trustee for the Uniformed Firefighters Association.
After picking a large dead rat from the trash outside the firehouse and holding it up for photographers, Humenesky said that less than 30 seconds after the kitchen lights would be shut off, rats would begin roaming the floor.
He added that the Fire Department decided to close the house after a department official visited Tuesday morning and "two rats ran across his feet."
The firefighters fought the rats till the end, he added, killing 16 rats over the weekend and seven more Tuesday.
"No human being should have to live or work under those conditions," he said, noting that on a typical night, there were more than a dozen firefighters sleeping overnight in the building.
The department's deputy commissioner for public information, Francis X. Gribbon, said the house was closed "due to serious health and safety concerns for the firefighters who work in this building."
"For several months the department has had an exterminating company working to resolve the problem at the firehouse," he said. "In recent weeks, despite the capture and removal of many rodents, the problem has become exacerbated and now the firehouse is infested.