Thanks for that.
I appreciate all the connected thoughts flying through your minds regarding Philadelphia, democrats, underground and a population of rats so overwhelming, modern progress, despite the determined efforts of the worker to set up his work area and complete the job, was unable to continue when one of the rats jumped on him causing him to abandon the area and call it in to his boss as a 'I ain't going back into that manhole ever again' close out on that ticket. He numbered them in the hundreds. It was a big manhole.
Free Republicans familiar with the Delaware Valley might remember when the Vine Street expressway was being constructed back in the 1980's; I mention that to give you a time frame of how long ago this took place.
How long did that spca scientist say it took for the mice to regenerate?Let's just double that for rats and divide that number into 14600 which is the number of days in 40 years. Getting ugly by now.
After the boss went out to the worksite he called the subcontractor of choice and turned over the job of recovering the manhole to them. They called him back about an hour later with a no way, jose message, there's thousands down there, we can't fix that.
So the boss, after discussing it with his boss, I'm sure, calls an exterminator, the one thats been around probably since the end of WW2 and shortly thereafter they called back and said 'sorry, they can't handle that big of a problem'.
At that point, the decision was allegedly made to abandon the manhole. I'm not sure how that worked out. Maybe after consulting with their engineers and social scientists of all kinds they might have concluded that all the construction disturbed the natural social pattern of the rats and decided to give them time to resettle.
What I do know is there's miles and miles of ductwork underground all large cities; imagine the rat population under NYC. One abandoned manhole doesn't mean the rats stop there.
If everything is political, rats are the perfect model for the democRAT party.
Just sayin'