After viral bus photo, SEPTA gets wave of bug reports
On Wednesday, Sarah Brooner says, she rode a SEPTA bus home from volunteering at the Arch Street Friends meetinghouse. She sat by a window, leaned her right arm on the frame, and read a book until she arrived at the stop for her home near Fairmount Park. The next morning, she found bite-like welts on her right forearm.
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On Wednesday, Sarah Brooner says, she rode a SEPTA bus home from volunteering at the Arch Street Friends meetinghouse.
She sat by a window, leaned her right arm on the frame, and read a book until she arrived at the stop for her home near Fairmount Park. The next morning, she found bite-like welts on her right forearm.
"I couldn't believe it," she said. "I thought, 'Where did I get these?' "
Brooner, who is in her 70s and teaches English as a second language at Camden County College, is among those who think a photo that went viral last weekend purporting to show bedbugs on a SEPTA bus seat might provide a clue to the bites noticed after riding public transportation.
Since last weekend, SEPTA said, it has received 31 complaints about insects, not necessarily bedbugs, on its vehicles. The agency said there was no way to verify whether any of the reported bites were inflicted on public transportation.
In fact, viral photo or no viral photo, SEPTA said, it is hard to know if bedbugs even were on any buses. But the transit agency is taking precautionary steps.
"We certainly regret that anyone was bitten by a bug on one of our vehicles, but we can't address it unless it's reported in a timely fashion," SEPTA spokeswoman Jerri Williams said.
The agency did not provide numbers Friday on complaints received about insects in the past year, but Williams said such complaints were rare.
Brooner did not file a complaint with SEPTA, she said, because she infrequently rides city buses. But she urged a reporter to pass along her account to the agency.
Experts said it was not clear that the pests in the photo from last weekend were bedbugs, but SEPTA responded by assuming that they indeed were the nocturnal, bloodsucking parasites. The agency said it thoroughly cleaned three buses that run from the Olney Transportation Center to Cheltenham and Ogontz Avenues.
The city's Bed Bug Task Force, established last year to address rising concerns about the pests in the city, has a meeting scheduled Wednesday, and the reports of bedbugs on public transportation are sure to come up, members said.
Though hard data are thin, task force member John Jordan, also chair of the Philadelphia NAACP's community relations efforts, said bedbugs are a problem that the task force has yet to solve. An educational program is planned, involving SEPTA, to post information about bedbugs on transit vehicles.
Bedbugs are as likely to affect the wealthy as the poor, said Jordan, and a challenge in combating infestations is the stigma attached to having the bugs.
"It really doesn't make you a bad person that you've got a bedbug in your house," he said. "It's so easy to get them."
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