“There were over 100 of them”…swarms of horn flies plague new apartment residents

Mr. Lee Mo, who moved into a new apartment in Incheon on the 20th of last month, was horrified when he looked at his shoe cabinet last week.

The new apartment was already equipped with furniture, including a shoe rack, dressing table, and refrigerator, but bugs started to emerge from the gaps around these built-in furniture pieces.

“I started seeing bugs one by one from Monday last week, and after about three days, there were more than 100 of them,” Lee said.

■ Swarms of bugs, presumably ‘hump flies’…”Concentrating on built-in furniture”

Mr. Lee’s apartment is not the only one in the 1,820-unit building, which started moving in February of this year, where residents say they started seeing bugs coming out of the built-in furniture in swarms in the middle of last month.

The bugs are believed to be ‘hump flies,’ which are known to appear in large numbers from April to June when the weather warms up, and live as eggs or larvae in the raw materials of the furniture, then emerge through gaps in the furniture as adults.

“We disinfected the house twice, once by the contractor and once by ourselves, but the bugs kept coming out,” Lee said, adding, “Especially because of the smell of disinfection, my wife and child are staying elsewhere.”

“Every time we disinfect the house for bugs, we have to remove the furniture, making it difficult for us to live our daily lives,” he said, adding, “Replacing the furniture is the fundamental solution, but the contractor is stalling with the disinfection.”

Some of the tenants reportedly spent millions of won to remove the built-in furniture on their own, while others demanded to cancel their rental contracts.

Although the construction company is conducting special disinfection work, residents are complaining of inconveniences such as additional disinfection on their own.

■ “What to do with the built-in furniture…the contractor is passive”

As the controversy continued, the contractor met with the tenant planning council on the 17th to provide a plan for dealing with hornworms and mold.

The plan includes ‘How to deal with humpback flies and mold’ and ‘How to deal with furniture with humpback flies and mold’.

However, the residents said the contractor was still being passive.

“The schedule says that there will be further consultation on how to treat furniture, but it’s not clear who they’re consulting with,” said Lee. “It’s not like the contractor is proactively inspecting and replacing furniture, but residents have to prove it,” he said안전놀이터.

“Residents are living in terrible conditions while the city tries to move on to the minimum response,” he said, urging the city to inspect all moldy, bug-infested furniture regardless of whether they applied for it or not.

“We will complete the remediation work by the end of this week for the households that applied,” the contractor said, “and if there are additional requests, we will continue the remediation work.”

However, when asked if they were replacing furniture, the company said, “We have no confirmation on how we have handled individual cases,” and that they are “working to reduce customer inconvenience.”