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 21 Gambit columnist Clancy DuBos writes about the Mother's Day shooting, and how the stages of shock and blame and healing mirror those traveled by the same city following Hurricane Katrina. The city will recover, just as it did following the storm, by reaching out to help the people injured most seriously by the event, DuBos writes. It's how we heal, he says.
MAY 21 Here's a post on the Advocate (but buried on a subpage, not on the front) that reports something Louisiana Voice reported some time ago: a top DOE official lives in Los Angeles and "commutes" to Baton Rouge. The positioning of the story caused a stir on Facebook Monday, with several posters asking if the Advocate was covering someone's hiney. Sentell's stories on DOE are notoriously soft, and this one is no different: don't expect any hard questions in here.
MAY 21 Here's another post from blogger Tom Aswell about the "course choice" program. He's already reported on kids being signed up without their consent or knowledge, and has more here: For example, he tells of a six-year-old who was signed up for high school Latin. He also digs a little deeper into the sister companies of the main one operating in Louisiana; all of them seem to have complaints against them. Stinky.
MAY 21 Given the 80 percent cut in higher ed funding since he's been in office, it's clear Gov. Jindal would rather give tax cuts to out of state companies than have a functioning system, blogger Dayne Sherman argues in this post. The cuts have been such a disaster, Sherman says, that it will take 30 years to fix what's been broken. He says he believes the aim is to shut down most of the schools before Jindal leaves in 2016.
MAY 21 Blogger CB Forgotston says there are too many elections in Louisiana, and they're costing us too much money. The proof is in the pudding: turnout for most of these nonsensical pollings gets worse and worse, CB opines, even as millions of dollars that could be spent on health care or higher ed go down the tubes. The legislature must take action to stem the tide of pointless elections, he says.
MAY 21 Here's an interesting investigative piece by WVUE on the retirement benefits of some Jefferson Parish public employees. According to the story, the taxpayers are paying 100 percent of the retirement contributions of employees who started work prior to a certain date in April 1986 -- and have done for more than 30 years. It costs the parish millions annually, and might not be legal, the story reports.
MAY 21 This post on Bayou Buzz provides insight from Louisiana's intrepid pollster, Bernie Pinsonat, on the winners and losers from this year's legislative session. But to hear Bernie tell it, there's almost nuttin but losers: Jindal, the Republican party, the Fiscal Hawks all get big goose eggs in his win column.
MAY 20 This post on The Lens takes a look at a huge (either $500K or $250K) bill that one NOLA charter now has for school lunches. The RSD says the charter group didn't fill out the proper paperwork for federal reimbursement, but the story details how the RSD didn't ensure the people running the charter had the proper training, despite requests from hapless charter employees trying to fill out forms. Either way, somebody's asleep at the wheel.
Most Read
in case you missed it
Subscribe to this comment's feed