Pest control in Katunayake

Katunayake is defined by the airport and the Free Trade Zone, and pest control here is overwhelmingly commercial. The domestic work exists but it is not what shapes the area.

Warehousing and light manufacturing dominate, and rodents are the leading problem in both. These are large buildings with frequent goods movement, roller shutter doors that spend a lot of time open, and material stored in bulk. The routes in are predictable and are almost always the answer: worn door seals, gaps under shutters, service penetrations for cabling and pipework, damaged brickwork at ground level, and loading bays standing open. Adding bait to a building with an open door is a running cost rather than a solution.

For a site that needs a documented programme, and most in the Zone do because their customers or their certification require it, we set one up properly: stations placed to a plan and numbered, checked on a schedule, and a written record of every visit and every finding. That record is usually what an audit actually asks to see, and it is far better to have it in place before somebody asks than to start it afterwards.

Canteens are the second half of the work. A facility feeding several hundred people has the same pressure as a busy restaurant kitchen with less flexibility about when it can be treated, so cockroach work goes into voids, hinges and the gaps behind equipment rather than across preparation surfaces, and flies are dealt with by finding what is breeding them rather than by adding more traps. Waste handling is usually where the answer lies, and where the fix belongs to the site rather than to us we say so.

Worker accommodation brings bed bugs, which spread through shared sleeping quarters faster than anywhere else we work, and which have to be treated as a block rather than a room at a time. Treating one room in a shared building is money spent on somebody else’s problem.

Mosquitoes matter here because of the low ground and drainage around the airport approaches, and because outdoor work and waiting areas expose people to them.

Katunayake is close to our Ja-Ela base, which makes it one of the easiest areas for us to reach and to keep returning to on a schedule.

The area divides sharply between the airport and Zone side and the residential and small commercial areas around Kotugoda, Liyanagemulla and towards Seeduwa. Those are different jobs entirely. Inside the Zone and around the cargo area it is warehousing, manufacturing, canteens and documented programmes. Outside it, it is ordinary suburban housing with the usual termites, ants and seasonal mosquitoes, plus the guesthouses and transit accommodation that cluster near an airport.

The sectors here are logistics, light manufacturing, garments, food service and transit accommodation. What most of them share is that they run continuously and cannot stop for treatment, and that their customers or their certification require a written record. Both of those shape the programme more than the pests do.

Shift patterns are the practical planning point. A Zone facility running around the clock has no natural quiet period, so treatment is planned around changeovers and around which areas can be released rather than around a working day. We would rather set that out with the site in advance than arrive and negotiate it at the gate.

Shift work also affects who reports a problem. In a facility running around the clock, the person who sees something at three in the morning is rarely the person who calls us, so information gets lost between shifts. A simple log kept at the gate does more for a site like this than an extra visit does.