The New York Times > Magazine > Phenomenon: The Roach That Failed

In 1979, the police in Schenectady, N.Y., responded to a complaint about a barking dog. When they arrived, however, they found cockroaches streaming from the windows of a two-family home, raining down from trees and darting into the street. Inside, roaches had plastered every wall like stucco and had left bites all over a 64-year-old woman and her 24 dogs, which, it turned out, had been barking for good reason. The swarm comprised approximately one million German cockroaches, perhaps the largest household infestation ever recorded.

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