Residents in a north Boulder neighborhood found themselves awakened Tuesday morning by what has become a familiar and terrifying sound — prairie dog burrows being blown up by a device known as the Rodenator.
The machine, which the Colorado Wildlife Commission approved for use in 2006 as an acceptable way for landowners to exterminate the rodents, pumps a propane mixture into burrows, then ignites the gas.
The result is an explosion that neighbors say rattles windows and frays nerves.
“That’s how I woke up yesterday morning, with just these booms,” said Leslie Middleton, who lives in the Orchard Creek neighborhood near the intersection of Jay and Spine roads. “It seems like it goes every 30 to 90 seconds.”
Middleton and about a dozen of her neighbors have been fighting the use of the Rodenator since several landowners in adjacent unincorporated Boulder County began using the device in 2007.
“Kids at the end of the cul-de-sac actually saw some prairie dogs on fire, running and screaming,” Middleton said of a previous Rodenator sweep.
Several Orchard Creek residents said the devices are cruel and exceptionally loud and could start a fire. They have repeatedly complained to Boulder police, the Boulder County Sheriff’s Office, county commissioners, Boulder City Council members and animal-control officers — but they all say there is nothing they can do.
Although the Rodenator is illegal to use in the city of Boulder, which has a strict management plan for prairie dogs, it is a legal method to control prairie-dog populations in unincorporated Boulder County.
Carrie Haverfield, the constituent-services liaison for the Boulder County commissioners, said the county has tried to find ways to mitigate the neighborhood’s concerns.
“What we found, legally, is that our hands are tied even with our noise ordinance,” she said.
Sheriff’s officials previously visited the neighborhood when the Rodenator was in use nearby. They found that the estimated 80-decibel explosions exceed the county’s limits of 50 to 55 decibels. But Haverfield said the land where the device is being used is zoned for agricultural uses, so the property owners are exempt from the noise ordinance under state law.
Boulder County Commissioner Cindy Domenico empathizes with the Orchard Creek residents, but she said there is a lack of political will among other Colorado counties to change the rules for devices such as the Rodenator.
“We thought maybe there would be an opportunity at a statewide level to at least raise the issue,” she said. “It just doesn’t have traction with the broader group.”
She said the county has been left “between a rock and a hard place.”
