Noise Pollution Standards Quietly Fade Away

The infernal racket of urban life can drive you crazy, but there’s only one person left at the Environmental Protection Agency who can hear your complaints above the din.

EPA scientist Kenneth E. Feith is the guy who picks up the phone and listens to laments about noisy trucks and trash compactors, shrieking jet planes and the banshee howl of the neighbor’s lawn mower.

Feith, 58, says he is the “institutional memory” of the EPA’s Office of Noise Abatement and Control, which once boasted a $10-million budget and more than 100 employees.

The office went out of business in 1982, the victim of President Ronald Reagan’s budget-cutting deregulation campaign. It now ranks as a “non-program” without budget or staff.

Feith, who once wrote the EPA’s anti-noise regulations, has other duties today, but he answers a couple of dozen phone calls about noise pollution every week as a courtesy to the public.

“I do this almost out of my hip pocket,” he says.

The noise, meanwhile, hasn’t gone away. If anything, it’s getting worse. Experts estimate that more than 20 million Americans are exposed daily to noise loud enough to cause permanent loss of hearing during a working lifetime.

That level is above 80 decibels, about the intensity of noise produced by a vacuum cleaner or electrical tools.

Studies also show that the stress of loud, sustained noise can cause high blood pressure, ulcers, headaches, insomnia, respiratory ailments, learning difficulties among children, job absenteeism, anxiety, irritability and anti-social behavior.

If the bells of Notre Dame drove poor Quasimodo nearly mad, the decibels are still giving us fits. To wit:

* A 69-year-old man living in a trailer home under a noisy airport flight path was arrested recently in Llano, Calif., after he allegedly took a 4-foot mirror outside and tried to blind pilots with reflected sunlight.

* An angry Bavarian mounted a catapult in his front yard and launched his wife’s homemade dumplings at low-flying jet fighters from a nearby military base.

* A Japanese apartment dweller, distraught that a young girl ignored his repeated complaints about her loud piano playing, went next door and stabbed the girl, her sister and her mother.

A woman was taken into custody in New York City for allegedly aiming a double-barreled shotgun at a maintenance worker outside her window, complaining that he was disturbing her and her pets.

The aggravation may get worse before it gets better, says Dr. Alice H. Suter, a research audiologist at the National Institute for Occupational Safety and Health and a leading expert on noise pollution.

“My guess is that it’s somewhat noisier than it used to be,” she said in a telephone interview from her office in Cincinnati.

“The newly manufactured jet planes and heavy trucks are quieter, but the overall amount of noise is greater just because there’s more of everything--construction, planes, traffic,” she said.

Suter said lack of money has prevented accurate measurement of increased noise levels. The demise of the EPA’s noise office also meant that the pipeline of federal money for research and technical assistance to states and localities dried up.

As a result, only 15 state and local anti-noise programs are still active, compared to 1,100 in the mid-1970s when noise pollution was a popular environmental cause.

The EPA’s anti-noise regulations remain in effect for trains, heavy trucks, railroad coupling and switching equipment, air compressors, motorcycles and labeling of earplugs, but there’s virtually no one to enforce them.

Meanwhile, despite improved truck exhaust mufflers and highway sound barriers, vehicular traffic still ranks as the worst offender. Another source of potentially damaging noise is the typical American home with its leaf blowers, mowers, power tools, food blenders, dishwashers and laundry machines, Feith said.

The experts say noise pollution is easily ignored in an industrial society concerned with oil spills, garbage, smog and other more visible forms of pollution, but they say it is no less hazardous to health.

“There’s never been a Greenpeace or a Sierra Club for noise,” Feith said.

“People don’t get as excited about noise as they do about cancer-causing agents in the environment. Noise doesn’t leave bodies in the streets. But it can cause physical, emotional and psychological effects that are just as debilitating.”