Here are some benchmarks. A really quiet room might produce a reading of 20-30 decibels; a rock concert, 110 or more. Decibels measure volume on a logarithmic scale, but never mind that. It’s enough to know that with each additional 10 decibels, the perceived volume roughly doubles, and when you move twice as far away from the sound source, the level drops by six.

Noise pollution is inevitable in modern life, but it tends to be a lesser concern for environmentalists than air or water pollution — especially those environmentalists who live and work in the relatively quiet countryside. 

At a more typically busy workplace, the Occupational Safety and Health Administration’s “hearing conservation program” kicks in at 85 decibels, and hearing protection is mandatory for workers exposed to 90 decibels or more during an eight-hour period. Denver has a noise-control ordinance that specifies a maximum allowable daytime level, for residential premises, of 55 decibels, and 50 for nighttime hours. 

Of course, these regulatory levels are based on averaged readings by technicians using certified sound meters — not scattershot samplings taken by an untrained reporter wandering around town. Besides, Burlington’s noise ordinance doesn’t specify decibel levels (Burlington police, the enforcers, don’t even own a sound-level meter), it just prohibits “unreasonable noise” — defined as “unreasonably loud given the time, place and nature of the noise.”

What noise would be unreasonable on Church Street? That depends. More loudness might be expected, and tolerated, during the Mardi Gras parade or the Jazz Festival. What about a weekday afternoon in early spring? What’s unreasonable then? 

Not the piped music under Leunig’s canopy, which registers in the low 70s. Not the ambient sound halfway down the block (mid-50s to mid-60s, moderate) — at least until Sally Pollak of the Free Press approaches, and says in a loud voice, about three feet away, “My grandmother always told me my decibels were too high.” She gets an 84, but then she walks away and the readings are moderate again all the way up to Cherry Street, where a dump truck produces 82.3. On the way back, something else is audible, a kind of caterwauling. “What’s that yelling?” someone says. 

Turns out to be singing. A busker who identifies himself as Dog’s Lostboy, fresh up from Florida and headed back out of town tomorrow, is strumming a guitar and singing “Lonesome Empty Bottles.” He has powerful pipes (baritone), plus his dog is barking. He’s sitting outside the Fremeau jewelry store, and from about 15 feet away, he registers a dog-aided 93.4. 

‘I know it when I hear it’

George Maille stood on his deck one day last week, nursing a coffee and looking over his backyard fence to the Burlington International Airport, which was just waking up. So were the neighborhood birds. It was 5:30 a.m. 

He could see the tails of two Jet Blue aircraft, and as dawn approached, he could hear bird calls punctuating the varying sounds from sporadic traffic on Airport Drive and from the airport itself, sounds that rose and faded — auxiliary power units, engines starting up, planes taxiing and occasionally, taking off. 


A sound-level meter registered in the mid-60s range when mechanized airport sounds were audible, up to 73 when a plane took off, perhaps a thousand feet away. On the other side of Maille’s house, facing Logwood Street and away from the airport, the reading was in the mid-50s, roughly half as loud. 

Any attempt to determine whether ambient noise in this neighborhood is excessive would require a rigorous monitoring and averaging of decibel levels over time. If such a test were done, Maille believes the level in his backyard would be above the standard set in South Burlington’s land-development regulations: a maximum one-hour average of 45 decibels between midnight and 8 a.m. But the city doesn’t own a noise meter, and the regulation seldom is enforced. 

Now and then a bar will get too noisy for the surrounding neighborhood, and the city will hire a sound expert to take the necessary readings, said Chuck Hafter, city manager. For the readings to hold up in court, he said, the sound technician has to be certified, and the equipment has to be recalibrated regularly, and contracting for all of that can be expensive. 

Still, the lack of enforcement has become a sore point with Maille, particularly since 2008, when two houses that stood between his backyard and the airport were removed. Those houses were among 83 properties within a 65-decibel corridor that the airport has acquired during the past two decades. After they were gone, Maille contends, he heard more airport noise than before — enough to wake up his family in the early morning, and enough to interfere with a recording studio he’d set up. Moreover, the airport is far busier now than it was in 1977, when Maille bought his house. Back then, ambient noise wasn’t an issue in his neighborhood. 

“Everything was fine,” he said, “until they took those houses down and didn’t provide any sound mitigation.” 

As he took in the ambient early-morning noise from the airport, Maille added: “We hear the birds, and the birds don’t seem obtrusive, but the constant low-frequency noise from aircraft can be disturbing.” 

The airport plans to install a “living wall” noise buffer along part of Airport Drive, but that’s not enough to placate Maille. He’s helped organize a petition drive calling for a new noise ordinance that would restrict nighttime flying by assessing a fee for all flights between 11 p.m. and 7 a.m. 

That proposal is anathema to airport officials, who say half the airport’s commercial flights take place during those hours. Most flights out of Burlington connect to hub airports, said Brad Worthen, the airport’s community facilitator. That means flights have to be provided early in the morning and late in the evening. 

If that business were eliminated, Worthen said, “The impact on the airport and local economy would be devastating.” Besides, the airport plans to double its capacity during the next 10 years. The airport is an economic engine for the region, Worthen said. He called the petition “irresponsible” for focusing narrowly on the neighborhood and not taking into account the broader economic ramifications.

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Even if his petition doesn’t curtail night flights, Maille said, he hopes it pushes the airport to provide some major noise mitigation — noise-reflective walls, say, or “ground run-up enclosures,” panels that mitigate the sound of engines being tested.

As for the F-35s — which would replace the F-16s in five years or so — the economy is a subtext in that debate, too, along with patriotism. The Guard says the new planes are essential to its mission and to the continued employment of 1,100 people, and the sound impact can’t be known until the study is completed. The F-35’s opponents, supporting the proposed ban, cite evidence the new plane is demonstrably louder than the F-16, which everyone knows to be plenty loud already. 

“The F-16s, when they take off, they shake the house,” Maille said. 

Brig. Gen. Steven Cray of the Vermont Air National Guard concedes that the F-35 “is somewhat louder than the F-16 at the same power settings.” But that doesn’t mean it will be louder on take-off, he said, because it won’t have to use afterburners, which account for some of the noise the F-16s make when they take off. 

Wait for the study, Cray urges South Burlington residents. 

“I’m confident that when the community is presented the data showing the impact,” Cray said, “there will be overwhelming support for the Air National Guard.” 

Is customary noise necessary?

At about 9 a.m. one recent day, two F-16s took off from the airfield. On average, Cray said, the Guard’s 18 jets make 170-190 flights a month. 

The handheld sound-level meter took readings from beneath a tree on the west side of Airport Drive, near the intersection with White Street, perhaps a quarter-mile from the runway. The highest measure was 116.4 decibels. 

According to the National Institute on Deafness and Other Communication Disorders, regular exposure of more than one minute to 110 decibels risks permanent hearing loss. The maximum roar of the F-16s lasted just seconds at the intersection, of course, and diminished quickly as they flew away. 

Many residents of Winooski, which sits directly beneath the flight path of commercial and military planes that use the airfield, have grown accustomed to jet sounds, which are loud enough to interrupt conversation inside a house. Aircraft noise in Winooski is virtually a fact of life, but the question remains, in Winooski and elsewhere: How much noise is inevitable or necessary in an economically flourishing society? The debate in South Burlington has an either-or quality, evoking a zero-sum game: commerce and noise versus quality of life and quiet. 

Perhaps the choice doesn’t have to be so stark. There are cities that have banned nighttime flights without killing off their economies. Cities in Switzerland, for example. But the Swiss don’t depend on aviation as heavily as we do — they can get around by rail.

“We have an impoverished set of options for transportation,” Blomberg conceded. “For long-distance travel, we only have aviation. ... It takes seven hours from Montpelier to New York City by train. It’s not really an option.” 

But noise isn’t just an offshoot of modern commerce. It’s a part of the cultural landscape that people often take for granted as they spend much of their days bathed in sound from iPods, or car radios, or Muzak, or home entertainment centers. 

For Lunamira in her residential neighborhood on the fringe of downtown, the most common noise problems come in two forms: loud passersby late at night and incessantly barking dogs. 

“I have found that trying to deal with people who make noise is usually not productive,” Lunamira said. “No matter how polite I am, they tend to get defensive and angry. ... Talking to noisemakers has worked only once or twice out of the many times I’ve attempted it. I think it’s ridiculous to ask people to work out their own noise problems as individuals without any community backup or enforcement.” 

Noise ordinances are written to deal with the worst offenders, Blomberg said. When a person making a complaint has to resort to a noise ordinance, the battle already might be lost. 

“So much about noise is about civility,” Blomberg said, “how we live together.”

Additional resources
• The Noise Pollution Clearinghouse has an extensive Internet library: www.nonoise.org. 
• Noise mapping of Chittenden County. This map was created for the Metropolitan Planning Organization in 2005 by RSG, a consulting firm based in White River Junction:www.rsginc.com/noise-mapping-of-a-vermont-county

An essay from noise-pollution expert, author and Vermont resident Garret Keizer appears exclusively in this week's print edition of Green Mountain, available in the Sunday Free Press. Pick up a copy to read Keizer's take on why noise is an indicator of the big problems society is facing.