PUGET SOUND, Wash. — A low rumble thrums through the deck as Tacoma, a 5,000-ton ferry, makes its run across Puget Sound from Seattle to Bainbridge Island. Standing near the railing, Colin McCann, a legislative analyst for Washington State Ferries, points to the water where the agency recently dropped a microphone 500 feet below the surface as part of a study to capture the acoustic profile of every vessel in the state’s fleet.
Washington aims to protect the area’s southern resident killer whales. The endangered clan of 73 orcas became a regional cause celebre last summer after a grieving mother orca carried the body of her dead calf for 17 days.
The orcas track salmon using echolocation, or sonar, and research has shown that the din in these heavily trafficked waters has hampered their ability to detect prey. Reducing vessel noise was a key recommendation of the Orca Task Force assembled last March by Democratic Gov. Jay Inslee.
Advertisement
“There’s been a lot of quick action,” McCann said. “You’ve seen that urgency.”
Once officials know the noise level each of the seven classes of ferries emits at various speeds, the agency will pair the details with a recently launched orca-tracking app. Ferry captains will be directed to slow down or reroute to accommodate the orcas.
State officials also want to quiet the discord affecting Olympic National Park, a landscape of coastal and mountain wilderness west of Seattle. Washington Attorney General Bob Ferguson, a Democrat, is suing to prevent the Navy from increasing flights over the park, citing effects on both nearby residents and wild animals, including endangered species.
These issues have made Washington one of the rare states to recognize sound pollution as a threat to its wildlife. Increasingly, research shows that human-caused noise can be harmful to many species. But little regulation — and even less enforcement — exists in the United States to limit the increasing encroachment of noise on the environment.
Advertisement
“The literature has shown that noise fundamentally changes behavior, distributions and reproductive success [for wildlife],” said Jesse Barber, who runs the Sensory Ecology Lab at Boise State University. “We can now clearly say that noise is a pollutant, but that takes some time to work its way into policy.”
Washington state Sen. Christine Rolfes (D) said she expects the issue to gain visibility.
“It might be one of the next frontiers of pollution regulations,” she said. “I don’t know that people have ever thought of noise as pollution. I certainly wasn’t that aware of it until recently.”
Most local noise ordinances address nuisance noise in residential areas, the kind of racket that draws neighbors’ complaints and has been shown to harm human health. Fewer legal guidelines exist to protect wildlife.
Advertisement
But states wanting to address the problem face challenges. Noise doesn’t stop at state, county or city boundaries. Many of the loudest sources are related to transportation; short of tearing up highways and relocating airports, officials have no obvious solutions. And law enforcement agencies may not have the resources to patrol with decibel meters and seek out violators.
Science has illustrated the harmful effects noise has on wildlife.
Several years ago, Barber and a team of scientists installed 15 speakers in an Idaho woodland and played traffic noises to create a “phantom road” over a half-mile of terrain. They found that 30 percent of songbirds moved elsewhere once the noise began, and many other species that remained struggled to gain weight.
Early efforts to regulate noise began in 1972, when the Environmental Protection Agency created the Office of Noise Abatement and Control, which set policy standards that many states used as benchmarks for their own regulations. Those included noise limits for the trucking industry, construction equipment and the transportation sector.
Advertisement
But when the Reagan administration shut down the office a decade later, citing a desire to transfer more regulatory power to local governments, states’ appetite for noise policy withered as well, experts say. As a result, noise pollution has grown largely unchecked in prevalence and intensity.
Share this articleShareThe EPA argued that local communities could better regulate noise, said Les Blomberg, executive director of the Noise Pollution Clearinghouse, a nonprofit group that tracks noise regulations throughout the country. “We’ve spent the last 40 years proving that wrong. Local communities can do a lot to regulate noise, but a lot of noise comes from noise sources in interstate commerce.”
In 2005, acoustic ecologist Gordon Hempton dubbed a hidden spot in Olympic’s Hoh Rainforest the One Square Inch of Silence, the quietest location in the contiguous United States. He has made it his mission to protect this place, and he is among many state residents concerned by the Navy’s proposal to increase training flights of its Growler jets over the park.
Advertisement
“Prior to the Navy arriving, it was not only the least noise-polluted national park in the U.S., it was also the most noise-diverse,” he said. “There are sounds you can’t hear anywhere else.”
One Square Inch is about a three-mile hike into the rainforest, amid chest-high ferns and moss-covered trees. The nearby Hoh River babbles in the distance, while nearby birds chirp incessantly. At regular intervals, though — rarely longer than a half-hour — the forest buzzes with the whine of a distant plane, or rumbles at a low-passing jet. Hempton said 80 percent of flights over the area are now conducted by the military.
“You add noise pollution into the background, and the owl that’s hunting at night can no longer hear the soft scratching of the rodent underneath the leaves,” Hempton said.
The Navy’s plan, which would increase by about a third its operations from a nearby air station, has prompted residents and organizations to form a coalition called the Sound Defense Alliance.
Advertisement
“We are squeezing all those natural sounds out of our environment,” said Larry Morrell, the alliance’s executive director.
The Navy has said the training is vital, and it stands behind its environmental review of the proposal, which found that the expansion is not likely to “jeopardize the continued existence” of endangered species.
Michael Welding, a public affairs officer with Naval Air Station Whidbey Island, said in an email that the Navy could not comment on questions related to its endangered species analysis because of pending litigation.
He noted, however, that the Navy already conducts an average of 2,300 Growler flights a year over the area that includes the park, and the proposal would raise that by only an additional 300 flights. Welding also said the Olympic Peninsula is an important training area, both because of its geographic diversity and airspace availability.
Advertisement
The attorney general’s office did not respond to a request for comment.
On another front, the Port of Seattle also is trying to crack down on noise. It oversees the docking of massive container ships that cross the Pacific Ocean and are the loudest ships on the water.
Port of Seattle Commissioner Fred Felleman said the orcas are such a popular cause that many in the maritime industry might voluntarily slow vessel speeds and stay away from whale feeding areas, while bolstering research on the effects of underwater noise.
The port also has provided onshore power sources for ships to plug into while they’re docked, so they no longer have to run noisy generators while they’re sitting in the water.
To what extent state leaders will try to clamp down further on noise pollution remains unclear. In response to Ferguson’s legal challenge, the Navy has said it will reevaluate whether its flight plans violate the Endangered Species Act, looking at disturbances to the marbled murrelet, a threatened seabird. That review is expected to be completed early next year.
Stateline is an initiative of the Pew Charitable Trusts.
ncG1vNJzZmivp6x7uK3SoaCnn6Sku7G70q1lnKedZMCktcSnmp5no6mutbHSZq6rnaOpuaa%2FjLCgraBdlnqtu9SdZJqmlGKwrbHAq2StoKKarrV506hksKGcmbmqssRoaWlpaWR%2BcXuRbmZtaZSWsHN9wGadbpmUYn5ysZhmb5yeYGKBpK%2BYcp1wbJRmf3ir0q2mq7FencGuuA%3D%3D