>>Before you start scattering paradichlorobenzene or naphthalene around
your storage areas, please go to www.msdsonline and get Material Safety
Data Sheets on these substances. I suspect that you won't want to use
them after that, particularly naphthalene. 

I appreciate the warning, and urge everyone to be aware of safety risks
in everything they do.

However, by trade I am an engineer and a physics professor. I've learned
over the years that the EPA or MSDS can make any substance sound like
something you do not want to use.  The upshot is that any substance is
poisonous in the right dose.  Ingesting water can kill you, so will
breathing oxygen. But in certain amounts or concentrations. The dose
makes the poison.

We are exposed to so many potentially lethal or damaging substances
every day that most people think nothing about.  Automobile exhaust,
diesel smoke, vapor from felt-tipped pens used on whiteboards, cleaning
solutions, fumes from a copier, dioxins and other solvents in plastics
that you put in the microwave, etc. How about every time you gas up your
car?  Lots of REALLY bad stuff in gasoline.  It's impossible to be
absolutely safe. 

What I advocate is knowledge and reason.  Everything is relative.
Everything has a risk. Think before you use.  
---Gas up your car at the filling station?  Probably OK.  Working with
gasoline as a solvent in an enclosed space?  Definitely NOT !!  
---Mothballs in your office where you sit for six hours a day?
Certainly not!  Mothballs in a storage area or closet that you might be
in for a few minutes a month? Probably OK. 

But the point is well taken, which is why I raised the question.  Are
they other, safe, non-destructive means to repel squirrels?  I'd rather
not use questionable chemicals for exactly the reasons I state.

--Scott  

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