City housing officials got so antsy over a bedbug invasion that they shipped off 5,000 boxes of files for fumigation, forcing Housing Court cases to be postponed.
The bloodsuckers turned up at the Department of Housing Preservation and development around Nov. 15, leading to the evacuation of the entire third floor, which contains the tax-incentives divisions and parts of the housing-litigation and IT divisions.
Officials said that even though the critters were spotted only in isolated areas, a top-to-bottom cleaning was ordered, meaning everything on the floor had to be temporarily relocated.
Boxes of documents were sent to a facility in Rockland County for treatment, which created operational headaches. Some paper files weren’t backed up on computers, and so they couldn’t be accessed temporarily.