Ward 3 City Councilor Robert Cronin on a weekend day took a walk down the Clipper City Rail Trail to find a noise Back Bay neighbors had identified as being a persistent nuisance. What he found was a dust collector that runs pretty much 24/7 at a business in the industrial park.

This intrepid new city councilor tracked down the source of his constituents’ complaint, but don’t look for the city’s building inspector to figure out who or what is violating Newburyport’s zoning ordinance related to noise.

“I really have no way of knowing what’s in violation,” Gary Calderwood said.

He said he would have to call in an acoustic engineer to report back to him on noise issues in the industrial park and other places in the city where neighbors complain about noise from a commercial business. Even armed with that expert information, Calderwood said he has been made aware that the allowable sound levels, as defined by the city, are outdated.

The inspector actually has been out to Bradford & Bigelow in the industrial park and its neighborhood four or fives times since he heard about the noise situation. In fact, he has spoken with Kathleen Kondylas of NEVA Associates, a Newburyport company that connects noise with noise control systems, and with some of the neighbors who complained, but Calderwood has neither the proper equipment nor the time to assess for himself if the noise is above acceptable levels set by the city and the state. Calderwood is one man, the only building inspector working for the city.

“I received numerous e-mails and calls about a constant loud noise in the industrial park,” Councilor Cronin posted to his blog on Jan. 19, explaining how he happened to be walking the Clipper Rail Trail. “From the e-mails, it seems to be coming from a ‘collector’ or giant vacuum at the Bradford & Bigelow facility located on 3 Perkins Way.”

Carmen Frederico, controller at Bradford & Bigelow, said the company believes it has identified a blower on a machine in its building as the culprit. He said the manufacturer of the blower, G.F. Puhl, is making a silencer for the blower. “That should alleviate some of the up-and-down noise neighbors are complaining about,” Frederico said.

Neighbors say that noise from the industrial park – saws running at Keiver-Willard Lumber on Graf Road during the day, for example – adds to the sound mix of traffic from Route 1, the MBTA station, city trucks backing up at Fulton’s Pit early in the morning and now the 292-foot turbine at Mark Richey Woodworking.

Cronin noted that, although the noise from the collector faded at the corner of Parker Street and Route 1, it was again audible as he went up Hill Street.

“As I got to the top, it was clear that this was not only a valid complaint but a true quality-of-life issue,” he wrote in his blog. The councilor did note that the wind was blowing in the direction of the residential neighborhood.

The dust collector is to the rear of the Bradford & Bigelow facility, a book factory that uses a custom-built recycling system, which Frederico said collects dust and paper debris in the building.

Cronin said last week he received e-mails from at least three different households complaining about the sound. The new Ward 3 councilor said he has notified city department heads about the issue and is hoping Bradford & Bigelow did not realize it was creating a nuisance and would “put a fix in.”

Not a new problem

Kondylas said she contacted Bradford & Bigelow about the noise nearly a year ago after hearing complaints from Back Bay residents.

“I volunteered to go down and work with [Bradford & Bigelow],” Kondylas said. “If nothing else, it’s waking people up at night. That’s not a healthy thing.”

She said the company didn’t take her up on the offer.

Frederico said Bradford & Bigelow has been working on identifying the noise since first being notified of the problem.

“We want to make sure we’re taking care of it,” he said, adding a representative from the manufacturer of the dust collector visited the Newburyport facility but could find nothing amiss with the equipment.

Kondylas pointed out that noise being energy, it affects more than just the ears.

“Blood pressure can increase by 14 percent, even with intermittent noise,” she said.

While Bradford & Bigelow runs three shifts, the bothersome noise from the dust collector is off and on.

Back Bay neighbors, already very vocal about noise from the wind turbine at Mark Richey Woodworking on Parker Street, are hesitant to make a big deal about this other source of noise, although Cronin said they did notify him within weeks of his taking the Ward 3 seat on the City Council.

Most thought the noise was coming from trains running all night at the nearby MBTA station, but Kondylas said a train sound is very different from the dust collector noise.

“Noise is very subjective,” she said. “You can’t predict who will be disturbed.”

But, she added, all over the country, industrial- and residential-zone occupants share the same spaces comfortably.