Feared rat tsunami doesn’t materialize in Narberth

In horror films, the terrible thing that everyone worries will occur ultimately does — with devastating consequences.

In real life, however, sometimes the universe is kind, and it restrains the furies from unleashing a predicted apocalypse.

That’s what happened — actually, didn’t happen — in Narberth.

Some history: In 2022, borough residents had been dreading an anticipated tsunami of rats surging throughout the well-to-do Main Line enclave after they’d learned that the long-empty Baptist Church of the Evangel on Elmwood Avenue, a 131-year-old gray stone edifice, was going to be demolished.

The panic started bubbling well before any significant work began. In July 2022, a piece of construction equipment on church grounds was noticed either digging or removing brush.

That’s when rats began scuttling like, you know, rats.

John Munroe, 21, who was a college student and a resident of the borough’s south side, said in July 2022, “I saw a rat scampering across the street. Nobody ever talked about rats my whole life living here.”

People who own expensive homes weren’t amused.

“Someone found a rat in their kitchen up on the second floor,” one of the residents said at the time.

“And when they take down the building, they all will be coming out.”

A homeowner whose land abuts the church said that she’d contacted a private exterminator who couldn’t do an inspection but had guessed that an entire “rat city” clustered inside the former house of worship.

Folks were toting up the potential havoc rats could wreak: salmonella, E. coli infections, not to mention fires. Rodents, including rats, are responsible for 20% of fires of undetermined origin in the United States because they chew through electrical wires (the word rodent is Latin for to gnaw), according to Dion Lerman, rodent, bedbug, and roach expert with the Pennsylvania Integrated Pest Management Program at the Penn State Extension Philadelphia County office in the Navy Yard.

Before any demolition, however, a potential hero arose: Kevin Walsh, building code enforcement officer for the borough, promised to “do a walk-through and make sure proper extermination facilities are in place.”

Whether that occurred will have to remain a mystery, at least for now, since Walsh didn’t return multiple calls for comment on Tuesday. Attempts to reach other borough officials, as well as the property’s developer — slated to build residential units where the church stood, according to residents — also were unsuccessful.

Narberth homeowners said that the church was finally demolished last summer. A big, muddy lot with some debris remains. And there’s blue sky where the steeple used to be.

More importantly, however, nothing dire happened.

Oh, maybe a few vermin were noticed. “We had several on our property when the church came down, but everything seemed to calm down,” said Munroe, now 22 and a paralegal planning to enter law school. “I think there was definitely a robust rat population in the building. But everything seemed to taper off. And people seemed to lose interest.”

True, said Rosemary McDonough, a retiree who lives near the church grounds. She didn’t want to give her age.

“We here in Narberth got a little hysterical thinking there’d be a tsunami of rats,” she said. “Myself, I haven’t seen a rat. So far, so good.”

If anyone cares, McDonough added, she does have a woodpecker problem. “They’re banging on the wood on the side of my house,” she said. “It’s so loud it sounds like they’re in my head.”

But that’s a tale for another time.

McDonough did say that earlier this week, she noticed a backhoe doing work on the property.

“But no one really knows what’s going on,” another neighbor, who asked not to be identified, said Wednesday.

“I suppose it’s not such an exciting story for the newspaper.”

But whenever a cataclysm of rats is avoided, Narberth residents would say, that’ll always be big news.