Jared Soares | The Roanoke Times

During a search for rat infestation in public areas in Roanoke last month, Environmental Health Officer Laura Thomas conducts smoke tests of sewer lines along with a crew from the Western Virginia Water Authority.

Photo courtesy Western Virginia Water Authority

During a search for rat infestation in public areas in Roanoke last month, Environmental Health Officer Laura Thomas conducts smoke tests of sewer lines along with a crew from the Western Virginia Water Authority.

Photo courtesy Western Virginia Water Authority

The Western Virginia Water Authority has caught several rats on video.

Jared Soares | The Roanoke Times

Laura Thomas photographs a rat hole last month. Thomas said she believes a shift to curbside trash collection has helped Roanoke's rodent problem.

You'd be hard-pressed to find someone as happy and as enthusiastic about her job as Laura Thomas.

Given her sunny disposition and her easy-going ways, you might at first mistake her for a kind-hearted elementary school teacher.

But that's not what Thomas does for a living.

For more than 30 years, Thomas has been an environmental health officer for the Virginia Department of Health.

Specifically: She hunts and eliminates rats.

In her work, she's concerned only with rodents that live in sewers or outside -- indoor rats, or mice, are left to private-sector exterminators. And although searching tunnels or burrows for vermin might seem downright terrifying to some, she tackles her job with genuine, friendly relish.

"You're not stuck in an office ... you're outside," Thomas said. "Each job that you go on, it's different. You never know what you're going to get into or come across."

Thomas, 56, stands an inch or two over 5 feet but drives a city pickup truck so large she has to use the door-frame handle to chin herself up into the cab. She keeps the seat slid as far forward as it can go and, still, her feet just reach the pedals.

"This is like being paid to have fun," she said last month as she made rounds, checking sites where complaints have been lodged and following up on previous inspections.

A former private exterminator, Thomas started with the department in late 1977, or as she likes to say, "Thirty-two Christmases ago."

At first, she said, she was kind of an anomaly in the job, "a woman doing men's work."

"Now, nothing is men's work, nothing is women's work," she reflected. "It's all everybody's work."

During a recent inspection in Northwest Roanoke, a man came outside and alerted Thomas to a hole sunk in the dirt beside a utility pole.

Thomas took out an iron bar she uses to pry open manhole covers and poked the yard-long rod, her hand and her wrist down into the dark.

"You could lose your foot in there," she noted wryly, and decided it was a rat burrow deep enough to bait with poison. If a hole is shallow, she won't use poison, she said, because children or pets might find it.

The poison, called Weather-Blok XT, is molded into bright blue slabs that look like heavy-duty soaps.

"Give 'em a good dose of that," the man said, laughing, as she brought the bait out of the truck. "Fatten 'em up so they can go to the happy hunting ground."

Once the Weather-Blok was deployed, he said, "I appreciate that," and added, "I appreciate the smile, too."

Back in the truck, Thomas rubbed antibacterial solution on her hands.

"The only good rat is a dead rat," she said. "They do so much damage. They damage stuff by feeding, gnawing, urinating. I'm sure there's a purpose for them, but I don't know what it is."

A few weeks before her "32nd Christmas," Thomas and a crew from the Western Virginia Water Authority spent a day running smoke tests, largely in Southwest and Southeast Roanoke.

During the tests a gas-powered pump is sealed over a manhole and white smoke forced through the sewer. If there are holes in the line, smoke will seep through them and make them visible from the surface.

"What we look for is any type of 'I and I' " or infiltration and inflow, said water authority crew leader Lester Entsminger, referring to infiltration of the lines by animals or an inflow of rain water. "We look for anything that becomes a problem and try to take care of it before it becomes a major problem."

While testing on Montvale Road, Thomas and Entsminger searched a mulch-lined yard for signs of rodents and for smoke but found none.

"The habitat here is prime, especially with all this mulch," Entsminger said. "But if it ain't smoking. ..."

Minutes later, the test paid off. A worker spotted a white plume of smoke rising from the ground.

"Rat hole," he announced, and circled it with green spray paint.

"Boy, that tickles me," Thomas said, sincerely happy. One more point scored in the game.

Yet what she almost never sees in the field anymore, she said later, are the rats themselves.

"I don't get to see them very much, not near as much as I used to," she explained. "Once in a while, if you take the lid off a manhole, you can see the rat slip on down into the line."

Those occurrences are rare, though, and Thomas attributes that to the city's shift to curbside trash collection. At one time the city employed four people to do the job she does now.

"They don't pick up in the alleys anymore. A lot of it is on the street in new containers. Before, [people] were just throwing the bags out into the alleys," she recalled. "I didn't think it would work, but it sure seems like it has."

At a house on Essex Avenue, Thomas knocked on a door. An older woman in a housecoat answered. An episode of "Bewitched" played on a big TV in the living room behind her.

"I think you got 'em all," the woman told her. "I haven't seen any since the last time you were here."

Thomas circled the yard, noting spots that used to be rat holes but had been filled with concrete. Even so, she found rodent trails in the brush and suspected the problem had moved next door, where a dog was kept.

Dog food and dog droppings actively attract rodents, she said. The worst infestations she sees, and the instances where rats are most visible, involve garbage or animal droppings that have been neglected.

In the next yard over, Thomas found a large roll of foam rubber laid over a grapefruit-sized hole in the ground. As fearless as Thomas seemed, it made her wary.

"I don't know if there's a groundhog sitting down there," she said cautiously, then advised the owner to get rid of the foam and seal the hole. She made a note to return later for another inspection and told the woman to call the Health Department if she had any other problems.

"You can call and ask for the Rat Lady," Thomas told her. "They'll know who I am."