The manager of a commercial office building in Saint-Liboire, a municipality in the Montérégie region neighbouring Saint-Hyacinthe, reported the presence of rats in the basement archives room and in the adjacent technical room. Saint-Liboire, crossed by Highway 20 and both residential and agricultural, has mixed-use buildings whose basements house technical rooms that are sometimes little frequented and therefore poorly supervised. The presence of restaurants and food shops nearby is a constant source of attraction for rodents, which find in these buildings both indirect access to food and warm, quiet spaces to establish their nest. An infestation in business premises must be dealt with quickly and discreetly so as not to disrupt the activities of tenants or affect the image of the building among its occupants and visitors. Our team intervened outside office hours to ensure total discretion throughout the operation. Our extermination company took charge of the entire case as soon as the call was received.
Diagnostics in an active office environment
The initial inspection covered the basement of the building, the archives room, the computer server room, the technical corridor and the entire exterior perimeter of the building, including the parking lot and the recyclable and organic waste collection area. The rodent infestation inspection confirmed a main activity concentrated in the archive room, where cardboard boxes of documents had been partially gnawed to serve as nesting material, rendering some documents partially unusable. Fresh and old droppings in the technical room, greasy traces along the bottom of the concrete walls and a characteristic smell of rodent urine in several corners confirmed regular and repeated movements for several weeks, or even more. The main access point was a ten-centimetre opening under the delivery dock, partially obscured by a recycling bin permanently left against the wall. Cracks in the parking lot foundation were opportunistically used secondary accesses. The inspection of the server room required special attention due to the risks associated with the presence of electrical cables and optical fibers that could have been eaten away, which could have led to costly outages.
Professional treatment outside of opening hours
The treatment plan was carried out entirely outside of staff hours, between 7 p.m. and seven a.m., to ensure the discretion requested by the manager. Outside, secure bait stations anchored to the ground were positioned along the foundation and under the delivery dock, where outdoor activity was most pronounced. Inside, closed-case mechanical traps were placed in the archive room, the technical room and the basement corridor, positioned precisely at the passage points identified during the inspection. In the server room, no chemical bait or violent trigger traps were used to eliminate any risk to the IT equipment: only live capture traps were deployed in this sensitive space. Two follow-up visits of less than two weeks confirmed the complete and lasting cessation of all activity. Our methods for commercial buildings are detailed on our rat extermination page.
Decontamination, sealing and structured prevention
A complete rodent decontamination was carried out in the archive room: removal and safe disposal of faeces and nesting materials, complete disinfection of the metal racks, concrete floor and walls with a biocidal product certified active against viruses and bacteria carried by rodents, then forced ventilation of the room to dispel persistent odours. The foundation cracks and openings around the delivery dock were then sealed as part of our caulking of the entry points, with hydraulic mortar and compacted steel wool at key points. The manager received a complete intervention report and a set of practical recommendations for the preventive maintenance of the building: relocation of the recycling bin, semi-annual inspection of basement joints and awareness of the first signs of infestation among maintenance staff. Consult our realization on rats in a commercial building in Montérégie for a similar well-documented case. An annual prevention program tailored to office buildings is also available for managers who want to ensure long-term protection.