We all know how unpleasant cockroaches can be here in the United States, but in New Zealand, cockroach infestations are off-the-hook. Back in 2016, the city of Auckland, New Zealand was at war with millions of cockroaches that had been invading the urban center from the countryside. The roaches were particularly numerous and troublesome in residential areas. Typically, a home has to be filthy before hoards of cockroaches invade, but the residents of Auckland had experienced massive waves of invading cockroaches simply for living in the wrong part of the world. An elderly couple, David and Philippa Gravatt, were just two people among hundreds who were forced to tolerate daily incursions of cockroaches into their homes. Unfortunately, 2016 was not the last year in which cockroaches besieged an urban area in New Zealand, as just a few days ago, massive cockroach hoards moved into the city of Hamilton.
According to David Gravatt, a resident of Auckland, cockroaches invaded his home for three consecutive summers before the latest case of cockroach invasions occurred in 2016. Every night before David went to bed, he set a total of six cockroach traps around his home only to find each one swamped with hundreds of cockroaches the next morning. David said that the average number of cockroaches that he captured every night had been around 120. After a month into New Zealand’s summer season David captured a total of 2,000 cockroaches.
David’s neighbors experienced similar cockroach issues, as their friend next door had discovered several of the insects within her baby daughter’s crib. David’s wife, Phillipa, noticed that cockroaches had been swarming out of a manhole near their home. Upon opening the manhole, both David and Phillipa became horrified to find cockroaches covering every corner of the exposed sewer system. Once this was discovered, Auckland’s local Government attempted to flush the roaches out of the sewer pipes, but this only worked as a temporary solution, as the roaches would rise to the surface again within a short period of time. This year, several residents of Hamilton, New Zealand are reporting cockroach issues similar to those reported in Auckland two years prior.
Would you be willing to live in a tropical paradise like Auckland even if you had to tolerate annual cockroach infestations?