Your Local London
Text your news or pictures to 80360 starting message with LOCAL. click here for details »
HARINGEY: Tenant forced into cockroach-infested flat
9:07am Saturday 1st March 2008
Comments (1)A Haringey teenager has been forced to move in to her cockroach-infested council flat, deemed "suitable living conditions" by authorities.
Melissa Lennox, 19, has been living in temporary accommodation in Ridge Road, Hornsey, for the past 18 months.
Three weeks ago she received a letter explaining the property was being refurbished and she was being rehoused at a flat in Russell Road, Seven Sisters.
Miss Lennox signed a tenancy agreement for her new home and was given the keys last week with an official moving date of Friday (February 29).
However, on visiting the property last week, Miss Lennox discovered the entire block of flats, a council-owned hostel, is infested with cockroaches.
Miss Lennox contacted Haringey Council and pest controllers were sent to the property twice, but have failed to eradicate the bugs.
Cockroaches walk the corridors and lifts as well as the flats, and leave their tiny egg sacks - which can each produce up to 30 cockroaches - around the building, but Miss Lennox has nowhere else to go.
She said: "Being there makes my skin crawl it's so nasty. I don't want my clothes there because the cockroaches could nest in them. I really don't know what I'm going to do.
"I feel disgusting knowing I share my home with something so horrible. It's not even my fault I'm being moved.
"It feels like the council's pushing me into this place and it doesn't care about anything it's doing. I'm a good tenant.
"Because it's temporary accommodation, I'm meant to put up with it. They keep saying it's suitable to live in but I wonder if they'd live here. "
If left untreated, a cockroach infestation can increase rapidly and turn into a major health and safety risk. The germs they carry can cause illnesses from dysentry to salmonella.
Experts suggest pest control treatment would be needed throughout the block of flats to stamp out the problem.
According to the council's housing needs survey last year, one in five households in the borough are living in "unsuitable" conditions.
But Haringey Council remains defiant.
A spokesman said: "The property has been treated twice since Miss Lennox reported her concerns. It is deemed suitable for her to move in. She is welcome to get in touch with us if she has further concerns."
Councillor Carolyn Baker, Liberal Democrat housing spokeswoman, said: "I am constantly amazed at the appalling standard of temporary accommodation in Haringey and the willingness of the council to turn a blind eye to the conditions people are subjected to live in for such long periods of time.
"It shows total disdain for people's personal and family life. Haringey Council needs to take responsibility for the situation of this tenant and ensure the source of the infestation is removed as soon as possible."
A cockroach found at Melissa Lennox's home
Melissa Lennox
In this section
- BUCKS: Wycombe's top cop praises Christmas card warning
- Mixed sex hospital wards still exist despite Labour pledges
- BARNET: Anti-Semitic attacks fuelled by Gaza conflict
- SUTTON: Police follow snowy footprints to apprehend bungling burglars
- SUTTON: Carshalton College investigates 'staff sex romp'
- LEYTONSTONE: Fourth ward closed at Whipps Cross as norovirus continues to spread
- WOODFORD GREEN: Biker is killed by cricket star's dad
- WALTHAMSTOW: Council leader apologies to pensioner left without heating
- CROYDON: Bus jumped red light before fatal tram smash, says report
- LEYTONSTONE: Headteacher and daughter rescued from icy pond
Sponsored Links
Local Information
Enter your postcode, town or place name
Stephen L. Tvedten, Marne, MI USA says...
9:00pm Tue 4 Mar 08
There are about 50 to 60 million insect species on earth - we have named only about 1 million and there are only about 1 thousand pest species - already over 50% of these thousand pests are already resistant to our volatile, dangerous, synthetic pesticide POISONS. We accidentally lose about 25,000 to 100,000 species of insects, plants and animals every year due to "man's footprint". But, after poisoning the entire world and contaminating every living thing for over 60 years with these dangerous and ineffective pesticide POISONS we have not even controlled much less eliminated even one pest species and every year we use/misuse more and more pesticide POISONS to try to "keep up"! Even with all of this expensive and unnecessary pollution - we lose more and more crops and lives to these thousand pests every year.
We are losing the war against these thousand pests mainly because we insist on using only synthetic pesticide POISONS and fertilizers There has been a severe "knowledge drought" - a worldwide decline in agricultural R&D, especially in production research and safe, more effective pest control since the advent of synthetic pesticide POISONS and fertilizers. Today we are like lemmings running to the sea insisting that is the "right way". The greatest challenge facing humanity this century is the necessity for us to double our global food production with less land, less water, less nutrients, less science, frequent droughts, more and more contamination and ever-increasing pest damage.
National Poison Prevention Week, March 18-24,2007 was created to highlight the dangers of poisoning and how to prevent it. One study shows that about 70,000 children in the USA were involved in common household pesticide-related (acute) poisonings or exposures in 2004. At least two peer-reviewed studies have described associations between autism rates and pesticides (D'Amelio et al 2005; Roberts EM et al 2007 in EHP). It is estimated that 300,000 farm workers suffer acute pesticide poisoning each year just in the United States - No one is checking chronic contamination.
In order to try to help "stem the tide", I have just finished re-writing my IPM encyclopedia entitled: THE BEST CONTROL II, that contains over 2,800 safe and far more effective alternatives to pesticide POISONS. This latest copyrighted work is about 1,800 pages in length and is now being updated at my new website at http://www.thebestco
ntrol2.com .
This new website at http://www.thebestco
ntrol2.com has been basically updated; all we have left to update is Chapter 39 and to renumber the pages. All of these copyrighted items are free for you to read and/or download. There is simply no need to POISON yourself or your family or to have any pest problems.
Stephen L. Tvedten
2530 Hayes Street
Marne, Michigan 49435
1-616-677-1261
"An invasion of armies can be resisted, but not an idea whose time has come." --Victor Hugo
"Our lives begin to end the day we become silent about things that matter." -- Martin Luther King Jr.