When Omar Arce helped his roommate remove the sheets from the mattress for laundry two weeks ago, he found dead bugs crushed on the corners.
He immediately went to check his bed and found a cluster of bugs on his mattress as well.
Arce, a first-year pre-economics student, said he went downstairs with his roommates to the Dykstra/De Neve front desk, where they were told that someone would check on the problem in a few days.
Arce and his roommates left a Ziploc bag with dead bugs outside the door of their resident assistant, who, upon seeing it, talked to the head of housing and got Arce and his roommates moved immediately into Courtside for a week while exterminators treated the room.
“We were happy to move out … but it was still a pain boxing everything to take with us,” Arce said.
Since Arce found the bedbugs in his room, three other rooms on the ninth floor of Dykstra Hall have been identified as having bedbugs, Arce said.
When students report problems of bedbugs, UCLA Housing calls Orkin, a pest-control agency, to confirm the presence of bugs and exterminate them using a heating treatment technique, said Alfred Nam, director for the rooms division of UCLA Housing and Hospitality.
For isolated incidents, students are moved to a temporary location in Courtside while their rooms are heat-treated. They are instructed to wash all clothes and linens in hot water to prevent the spread of bedbugs. Rooms are monitored weekly for reoccurrence.
Nam said there have been seven confirmed cases of bedbugs since the beginning of the year. Four of these were on the ninth floor of Dykstra, which he said is the only concentrated area of infestation. On Monday, residents were instructed not to be on the floor from 9 a.m. to 4 p.m. as the entire floor was being sprayed as a preventive measure to eliminate possible cross-infestation.
Other than addressing problems as they arise, UCLA Housing is not taking any further steps to eliminate bedbugs, Nam said.
More students suspect they have a problem, said Luba Ismakova, a first-year business-economics student.
Ismakova said she and her roommates tried to get treatment in their room three times.
“The first time, we suspected it, and we asked them to take a look,” she said. “They found nothing. The second time, we had bites and rashes. They inspected it and found one bug, which they said wasn’t enough to move us out and treat the room.”
On the third attempt, when multiple bugs were found, Ismakova and her roommates were finally moved out.
“I couldn’t be in the room, I was too scared,” she said. “It completely interfered with everything.”
Though bedbugs have not entered most rooms on the floor, neighbors of those with bedbugs have still been affected.
Nairi Khachatoorian, a first-year political science student, said her room doesn’t have bedbugs but her side of the floor does.
“Whenever someone had a bad infestation, like bugs on the pillows … they were putting them on the hallway outside the floor,” Khachatoorian said. “It was not contained at all. They were in the hallways and in the lounge.”
Khachatoorian said she and her roommates felt so uncomfortable that they slept in their friend’s room in Courtside on Thursday.
“I was disgusted out of my mind,” Khachatoorian said. “No one can understand it until it happens to them. Right now, you can be comfortable going to sleep in your bed, but imagine even when you’re supposed to be resting, you can’t relax.”
She said she was relieved that Orkin was going to do a floor-wide treatment before the problem keeps spreading.