One morning last week, John Pinto walked out of his downtown condominium at 6 a.m. and saw one of the locals having breakfast on his front lawn: a foot-long, Norwegian rat. “Not uncommon,” Pinto tells me. A few weeks before, a tenant who was eight months pregnant walked out of the front door and crossed paths with a rat. She stopped. The rat hopped over her foot. She screamed and ran back inside.

“We thought she was going to lose her baby,” Pinto says.

Pinto's 'hood is not some seedy section of town. His neighbors at 16th and L streets, Northwest, include the Russian Embassy, the University Club and the Capitol Hilton across the street. National Geographic around the corner. The White House four blocks down 16th. And thousands of rat hotels.

“These things are the size of cats,” he reports. “It's an epidemic.”

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Few things cross race and class lines to unite Washingtonians. The Redskins did the trick for decades, before going to a home game became the nightmare at FedEx Field, thanks to the parking hassles, frisking of every fan, obnoxious marketing ploys and expensive but innocuous teams.

The new “R” word that unites us is rats. They have infiltrated every nook and cranny of the capital city. Last week cameras from the TV show “Inside Edition” showed rats gallivanting around alleys and hanging out in popular Dupont Circle eateries. Ask folks from Shaw to Shepherd Park to Chevy Chase to Georgetown what lives in the alleys. Rats.

The adaptable rodents have shown up in the halls of federal bureaucracies and the walls of new buildings in former industrial zones. Take the XM Radio satellite headquarters off New York Avenue. Earlier this year, Senior Vice President Dan Turner sent a memo to his staff asking them to keep all food and magazines out of the building and added that the crawl space under the floors “represents an eight-lane superhighway to anywhere the rats want to go.”

My first rat skirmish took place back in 1993 behind my apartment on 19th Street off Dupont Circle back. Armed with an air pistol that looked too much like a semiautomatic, I whiled away hot summer nights plinking rats, until a dog walker alerted the cops, who ended my Dirty Harry routine.

What is the DC Department of Health doing about our epidemic?

“We're declaring a war on rats,” Health Department spokesman Leila Abrar tells me. One it seems to be losing right now.

“It’s not totally unexpected to see more rats in the warm weather,” says Pamela Keller, chief of the bureau of community hygiene. “More rat babies, people leave more food around. It’s not a war we can win by ourselves.”

Says John Pinto: “It’s going to take someone getting bitten before we get some action. Somehow, this has to get to Mayor Fenty’s bullpen.

Perhaps it will take a rat snatching one of the mayor's energy bars.

Harry Jaffe has been covering the Washington area since 1985. E-mail him at hjaffe@washingtonian.com.