Bob Wilbur thought he had found a retirement home that would be a place of peace. Located off Admiralty Bay on the western tip of Whidbey Island, the three-story home is surrounded by trees and shoreline. It offers the kind of tranquility that only an island can provide. Except when the Growlers fly.
Up to four days a week, the Boeing EA-18G Growler electronic attack aircraft based at nearby Naval Air Station Whidbey Island flies overhead as pilots practice touch-and-go landings. The noise is immense, on the level of a loud rock concert. “It interrupts your day,” Wilbur said. “You can’t have a nice evening at home. You can’t communicate. You’re constantly trying to organize your day around the fact that you’re away when the planes fly.”
New research from the University of Washington shows that noise is not only harmful, it poses a substantial risk to public health. Published May 9 in the Journal of Exposure Science and Environmental Epidemiology, an analysis of the Navy’s own acoustic monitoring data found that more than 74,000 people are exposed to noise levels associated with adverse health effects.
“Military aircraft noise is substantially more intense and disruptive than commercial aircraft noise,” said lead author Giordano Jacuzzi, a graduate student at the University of Washington School of the Environment. “Noise exposure has many downstream effects beyond simple annoyance and stress (high levels of sleep disturbance, hearing impairment, increased risk of cardiovascular disease) that have real impacts on human health and quality of life. They also “We found that several schools in the area are exposed to levels that have been shown to put children at risk of learning delays.”
Guided by conversations with community members and local advocacy groups, researchers analyzed four weeks of acoustic and flight operations data collected by the Navy in 2020 and 2021, in addition to data from the previous year collected by a private acoustics company. and the National Park Service. The researchers then mapped noise exposure across the region to estimate how much noise specific communities were exposed to in an average year.
Researchers estimated that two-thirds of Island County residents, including everyone in the cities of Oak Harbor and Coupeville, were exposed to potentially harmful noise levels, as were 85% of the population of the Swinomish Indian Reservation. .
In total, an estimated 74,316 people were exposed to average noise levels that posed a risk of annoyance, of which 41,089 were exposed to nocturnal noise levels associated with adverse effects on sleep. Another 8,059 people, most of whom lived fairly close to aircraft landing strips, were exposed to noise levels that may pose a risk of hearing impairment over time.
“Our bodies produce a lot of stress hormone responses to noise in general, no matter what type of noise it is. But particularly if it’s a high-pitched, repeated noise, you might expect the stress hormone response exacerbated,” said co-author Edmund Seto, a professor of environmental and occupational health sciences at the University of Washington. “What’s really interesting is that we’re reaching levels of noise exposure that are really harmful to hearing. Normally I only think about hearing in the context of working in factories or other very, very loud occupational environments. But here, we’re reaching those levels.” for the community.”
Taken together, the potential damage could be quite serious, Seto said. “Imagine people trying to sleep, or kids at school trying to understand their teachers, and you have these planes flying.”
Each monitoring station on Whidbey Island measured noise events of over 100 decibels when planes were flying. In some cases, noise levels were “off limits,” exceeding the limits of models used to predict the health effects of noise exposure around the world.
“We found it surprising that the noise from the Growler exceeds the scientific community’s current understanding of potential health outcomes,” said co-author Julian Olden, a professor of aquatic and fisheries sciences at the University of Washington. “For this reason, our estimates of health impacts are conservative.”
The noise has been the subject of community disputes and legal controversy since 2013, when the U.S. Navy moved more Growler aircraft to Whidbey Island and increased the number of flights to more than 110,000 per year. Bob Wilbur is a member and current president of Citizens of Ebey’s Reserve, a community group that has sued the Navy over aircraft noise and increased flight operations. The group also helped facilitate the University of Washington study and Wilbur is a co-author.
Like other military aircraft, the noise of Growlers differs significantly from that of commercial aircraft: it is louder and deeper, the type of sound that people feel before they hear it.
“It’s the intensity, the intermittent nature of the noise and specifically the low-frequency energy,” Jacuzzi said. “Those three things are very different from what you experience on normal commercial flights, which are predictable and high altitude. When the Growlers fly over a house, they make a loud thud that penetrates the windows and shakes the walls.”
While commercial aircraft noise has been the subject of extensive studies, research on military aircraft noise is relatively rare. Previous research led by the University of Washington found that military flights were the leading cause of noise pollution on the Olympic Peninsula. While discussing that study, Whidbey residents complained that the noise was disturbing their sleep and interfering with students’ schoolwork, prompting this new line of research. While conducting this study, researchers worked closely with community members and advocacy groups and held multiple webinars to share results and shape future work.
“Our investigation was prompted by the growing chorus of complaints from Washingtonians in several counties,” Olden said. “We believe that the science speaks for itself. It is no longer a question of whether noise affects people, but rather how, where and to what extent these effects are experienced.”
Other authors include Lauren Kuehne of Omfishient Consulting and Anne Harvey and Christine Hurley of the Sound Defense Alliance. This research was funded by the University of Washington Population Health Initiative.