An executive with Southern Theatres LLC, the company that owns and operates The Grand Theatres, has not confirmed nor denied a tip The Ind received concerning an ongoing problem with bed bugs at The Grand 16 on Johnston Street. He does, however, assert that “we’re being proactive on it” and “this isn’t a big issue.”
Bed bugs, the blood-sucking insects known for their night-time attacks, rapid spreading and resilience to pest control treatments, have reemerged across the country in recent years, though major infestations like those experienced in larger cities haven’t been reported in Acadiana.
Asked Thursday morning about bed bugs at The Grand 16, Ron Krueger, chief operating officer for Southern Theatres LLC, says “we treat it like any pest that can come into a place of public assembly.”
“Things are pretty quiet on our front," Krueger says. “We’re being proactive on it and have been for a while. We constantly survey and if there is an issue we do treat.”
A recent article from MedicineNet.com explains that bed bugs can live in almost any type of furniture, clothing or bedding. They’re also known to hide inside of walls:
They spread by crawling and may contaminate multiple rooms in a home or even multiple dwellings in apartment buildings. They may also be present in boxes, suitcases, or other goods that are moved from residence to residence or from a hotel to home. Bed bugs can live on clothing from infested homes and may be spread by a person unknowingly wearing infested clothing.
Movie theaters in Times Square made headlines in August 2010 when they, too, fell victim to the infiltration of bed bugs in New York City. According to a report from CBS News, an AMC Entertainment spokesman said one theater discovered the bed bugs due to a customer complaint, after which “we immediately closed [the theater]” until it was treated.
The theater in New York also removed the seats from the auditorium and replaced them with new ones, CBS reports.
Asked whether Southern Theatres would close The Grand 16 on Johnston if the problem persists, Krueger says “we haven’t seen the need to do that.”
“If you have a visitor to your house that has a bed bug, then you’re going to have to address it and fix it,” Krueger says. “Then if you have another visitor show up you have to treat it again. To characterize it as a consistent problem isn’t accurate. We’ve got a number of guests visiting the theater on a regular basis. It’s treating pests like any other pest control. This isn’t a big issue.”
But bed bugs are not “like any other pest.” They are “very adaptable” insects, according to a report from MSNBC, that spread quickly and can easily crawl from furniture (like movie theater seats) to clothing:
They will routinely travel as far as a 20-foot radius from their hiding places (and back) in one night to take a blood meal. They move much quicker, and can pass through much smaller openings or cracks, than most people expect. Even Ph.D. entomologists who work with live bed bugs for the first time are often surprised. Bed bugs can detect (and often avoid) chemical deposits such as some cleaning agents. Adult bed bugs can live longer than a whole year without feeding and most currently labeled insecticides used against them in the U.S., Canada, Europe and Australia, do not last more than one to three months when applied by a well-trained and competent [pest management professional].
MAY 24 Blogger Robert Mann posts this entry about the Baton Rouge Chamber's recent report on Louisiana's higher education system. It's critical to economic development, and yet our system is facing a "funding crisis" with no way to resolve it, the report says. The Chamber says control of tuition and fees must be returned to the higher ed governing boards.
MAY 24 Here's a NBC33 story about Tyrann Mathieu. He has signed with the Arizona Cardinals, inking a $3 million, four-year deal. He gets a signing bonus of $265K, but gets another, larger bonus if he doesn't get cut from the team for doing drugs. The deal reportedly includes mandatory tests and meetings for the player.
MAY 24 Jarvis DeBerry posts here about the redonkulus rhetoric that would have us believe NOLA is a safe city with a murder problem. Maybe the city's crime stats don't compare with its murder stats because you can't manipulate a murder, he says: a dead body's a dead body. It just doesn't make sense, he says, and his readers agree: a poll asks if they believe the city is safe, and more than 90 percent say no.
MAY 24 Jindal administration officials announced Thursday that the privatization of public health care is going to cost a lot more than they budgeted for, the Advocate reports here. "I'm so surprised," said no one. Anywhere. The cost they're projecting now is more than $1 billion - a lot more than the $626 million budgeted for it. And, it's more than it cost the state to operate those hospitals. So why are we doing this again?
MAY 24 Blogger CB Forgotston ridicules the recent PR campaign by the state GOP in the wake of a legislative auditor's request to both major parties. The GOP (apparently unaware that the Dems got the same request) started yammering about being targeted because it had "killed" a tax increase. CB finds that laughable, but it's also pretty funny that the GOP was comparing this episode to the IRS scandal (Because the President has so much to do with our state auditor. Right?).
MAY 24 Politico details some recent fund-raising efforts by Sen. David Vitter, which have raised the question of his future political plans. This time, it is a $5,000 per head "bayou weekend" that includes "Cajun cooking" and an all-caps "alligator hunt," the story reports. Funds raised go to a super PAC that can spend money to support Vitter in federal or state races, the story points out.
MAY 24 The pink building on Royal in the quarter was sold at a sheriff's sale Thursday, this Picayune story reports. An injunction that would have halted the sale wasn't enforced because the family failed to post a $150,000 bond, the story reports. So the owner of the mortgages on the building bought it, for nearly $7 million. Now the feuding family will have to negotiate with that company to get a lease on the building that has housed their business for close to 60 years.
MAY 23 This post in Louisiana Voice tells us about a bill by a Winnsboro lege that would require all public high school students to take at least one Course Choice online class in order to graduate. (What?) Blogger Tom Aswell says it's a monument to "waste and corruption," especially in light of the problems he's exposed with the program in recent weeks. Idaho had a similar program, but voters removed it by a 2-1 margin, Aswell says.
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