Dive Brief:
- Google employees in New York City over the weekend were directed to work from home after bed bugs were found on the tech giant’s Chelsea campus, according to news reports.
- Exterminators using a sniffer dog confirmed the outbreak. By Monday morning, employees were told remediation was complete and they could return to the office.
- Google is inspecting one of its other New York City offices, in Hudson Square, “out of an abundance of caution,” Wired reported based on an internal email that was shared with the publication.
Dive Insight:
Bed bugs spread quickly when people carry them on their clothes or in their bags. “They can hide in your personal belongings, or even on you,” exterminator Orkin says in an information sheet.
In internal texts, some Google employees said they think the bed bugs were carried into the office on some oversized stuffed animals, according to the Wired report.
“Google’s offices in New York are home to a number of large stuffed animals that are rumored to be implicated in the outbreak,” Wired said.
Remediation typically involves either a heat treatment or the use of insecticides, or both, along with disposal of infected material, Orkin says.
“Targeted treatment options — like heat or residual insecticides — [can] eliminate infestations with minimal disruption to operations,” the company says.
Google is the latest company with New York offices that’s been hit with an infestation since the summer, according to reports.
“The city that normally prides itself on its permanent state of cool [is] in a veritable panic,” the Guardian says in its coverage of the problem. “The blood suckers have wreaked havoc everywhere from the Empire State building to hospital wards, the prosecutor's office in Brooklyn and Time Warner's Manhattan headquarters.”
Another one of Google’s New York offices, on 9th Avenue, was hit with an outbreak in 2010 during another period when infestations were spreading around the city. Officials fielded some 13,000 help-line calls about the bugs that year, a Guardian report at the time said. The Wall Street Journal, Victoria’s Secret and the Waldorf Astoria were among other high-profile companies affected by that outbreak, Page 6 reported.
Google’s Chelsea campus consists of multiple buildings. Among them is a 15-story, 2.9 million-square-feet art deco building built by the Port of New York Authority in 1932, which the company bought in 2010 for $1.8 billion, and the 1.2 million-square-foot Chelsea Market that the company bought in 2018 for more than $2 billion. The reports didn’t specify if the infestation affected all of the campus buildings or just one. The company didn’t immediately respond to a request for comment.
The company is asking its employees to report to its facilities team if they think they’ve seen a bed bug onsite and to contact an exterminator if they see signs they’ve brought the infestation to their home.
