Oh Rats! Major infestation at Rock Cottage shopping centre

You are driving late at night along Jan Groentjie Avenue in Weltevreden Park when your main lights hit the wall behind Rock Cottage shopping centre and you see something scatter in different directions. Rats!

For months, residents at Rock Cottage Residential Villas have been struggling to deal with the infestation of rats from the nearby shopping centre and subsequent littering. One of the trustees of the complex, Lindiwe Ntuli said, “It started with the consistent littering by the staff from the centre and some of the stores whose employees can be identified by their uniform. During their break they sit under the trees around our boundary wall and have their lunch there. The issue is that they leave wrappers or bottles on the ground; they don’t throw it away in the rubbish bins. Sometimes they even leave some food there.”

She said they have tried to address the litter issue with the centre’s management. “Centre Management has ignored us and the problem has only gotten worse now with the rats,” she said. Madikana Chokwe, the chairman of the body corporate trustees added, “The rats are the biggest problem but wet waste is also seeping from the wall behind the centre which cannot be healthy. It runs down the street here. They are very careless of the environment around their centre.”

When we walked towards the back of Rock Cottage and switched on our flashlights, we were met with a jarring sight as dozens and dozens of large rodents scattered off. The loading dock may be dark but the smell of the garbage immediately greeted and guided us to where it had been discarded. A lot of the trash had not been discarded in the bins properly, and the added waste water nearby is a recipe for numerous health hazards – not just for the residents but evidently for the customers who shop there as well.

“The shopping centre has not even responded to one email,” Ntuli explained. “We have been trying to contact them for years just about the littering. We started bringing up the rats issue in December. They don’t seem to care. They don’t clean this area.” Chokwe added, “They don’t appear to care about the well-being of the environment they operate in. You start to wonder about the safety of the food they serve.”

Next to the centre are the offices of Nashua West Rand and some of the employees revealed that they had spotted the rodents. Although luckily the rats were not inside their offices, they had been seen on the grounds and spotted in the gardens.

Furthermore the residents have raised concerns regarding delivery trucks when they offload stock. They said the trucks sometimes get stuck at the entrance and block the narrow road, limiting access for them. “They once drove into the wall here and just left it like that so we put up these black poles. They have driven into them as well, and took out four of them.”

Calls to Rock Cottage centre management were not answered.