By Jen WiecznerThe Daily Northwestern

When she sleeps in her third-floor dorm room in Allison Hall, Communication freshman Erica Everage dreams of cockroaches.

Cockroaches creeping into her bed. Cockroaches scuttling between her sheets. Cockroaches tickling her legs. Cockroaches swarming over her body.

“I would wake up in the middle of the night and think they were crawling on me,” Everage said.

Now, whenever she gets the chance, she doesn’t sleep in that bed or even in the room she fears is infested. Instead she bunks in friends’ rooms at the International Studies Residential College, virtually exiled by nightmares spurred by the bugs.

“We’ve seen them on our walls, on our floors, on our desk drawers, on our beds,” said Weinberg freshman Zoya Kolkin, Everage’s roommate.

Kolkin said she saw a roach in the past week and that she usually tries to kill the the insects with slippers or newspapers.

“I kill them and try to get over it because I’ve been told there’s nothing to do about it,” said Kolkin, adding that she told her Community Assistant about the problem multiple times.

“There’s a stain on my wall from when my roommate killed one of them,” Kolkin said, describing a brown smudge the size of her pinky. “I don’t think it’s acceptable for students to be living with cockroaches.”

Insect Surge

Medill sophomore Marnie Soman, a former Daily staffer, faced a similar cockroach problem when she lived on the second floor of Allison during Fall Quarter.

“There was a bug here and there and then all of a sudden we started seeing a lot of them,” Soman said. “Once I started to move a school bag and one ran out.”

Soman and her roommate picked up insecticide and some traps to put under a desk.

“There were a ton under her desk, and we freaked out,” Soman said. “It was disgusting.”

Soman and her roommate stopped sleeping in their room, staying at the apartments and dorm rooms of friends and relatives.

Soman said she and her roommate could not understand where the bugs were coming from, or why they were even there in the first place.

“There has definitely been a surge in cockroach problems” in the Chicago area, said Austin Henry, service manager at Evanston’s Smithereen Pest Management, attributing the increase to reduced effectiveness of certain insecticides.

“Wherever there’s food in a room, you’re going to have cockroaches,” said Joe Simonetti, NU’s associate director for housing operations.

But Soman said she was careful not to leave uncovered food in her room. Still, the bugs kept coming, particularly to the girls’ desks. “All that was in there was school supplies,” she said.

Soman said she contacted her CA, who requested assistance from NU’s housekeeping.

Housekeeping sent an exterminator a few days later, Soman said, but she and her roommate had already arranged to move to Foster-Walker Complex.

Gary Wojtowicz, director of operations for facilities management, said all reports of pests and extermination requests in housing would be funneled to NU’s housekeeping office.

Anderson Pest Solutions handles NU’s extermination requests through facilities management, a company representative said.

When reached by phone, a housekeeping official denied that an exterminator was sent to Allison. Simonetti, however, said he recalled a cockroach extermination in Soman’s room.

When told by a reporter of recent cockroach sightings, Simonetti promised the problem would be “taken care of” the next day.

no simple solutions

For Kolkin, who does not want to move out of Allison, finding a solution is not so simple.

She and her roommate keep their food closed but said they still have roaches. They have sprayed insecticide, but the bugs keep coming back. Neither housekeeping nor an exterminator had dealt with their problem as of Wednesday.

Simonetti said residents must go to their CAs if they have any pest problems.

But Everage, Kolkin’s roommate, said her CA told her there was no solution.

“She was like, ‘I get the guys to kill mine, too.'”

Out of Allison, Soman is sleeping easier.

“I had to move. Every time I opened a drawer, I was afraid one would come out,” she said. “There’s just something about cockroaches.”

Reach Jen Wieczner at [email protected].