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The Price in Dollars

It may come as a shock to think of noise as costing money; however, it doesn’t come cheap. Noise puts a multi-million dollar hole in the nation’s pocket.

The most common measurement for the price of something is dollars. There have been few attempts to measure what either the individual or society is paying for excessive noise. We must face the fact that it is probably cheaper–in direct dollars–to make noise than to curb it. This is why we must recognize a price in health, and the intangibles discussed in the next chapter.

In industry alone, noise is a huge hidden extravagance. Some authorities are convinced that the potential cost of noise-induced hearing loss is greater than that of any other occupational disease. The Federal Council for Science and Technology has reported that if only ten per cent of workers eligible were to file claims, and the average award were $1,000, the total could reach $450 million.

In actuality, hearing-loss awards average $2,000. In 1962 and 1963, New York State paid $250,870 to 187 workers for hearing losses. When a drop forge plant closed down in Connecticut, the 64 men of the work force got a final settlement of $145,488, an average of $2,298 per worker. In a landmark suit against Bethlehem Steel by 323 shipyard workers, their collective claims totalled $5 million. The company settled for $250,000, plus lost time, litigation costs, and medical fees.

In the military, the tip of the iceberg of noise waste can be measured by such hard statistics as this: By 1968 the Veterans Administration was spending $65 million annually in rehabilitation programs for 90,000 veterans with service-connected hearing disorders.

Noise, authorities agree, causes an increase in errors. The Wilson Committee reported that noise above 90 decibels causes a significant rise in mistakes, particularly after the subject has been working for some time in noisy surroundings. “This effect seems to be produced even in people who are accustomed to noise,” the Committee said. When they get around to studying the subject, investigators may discover that one reason for the high incidence of poor-quality manufactured products, whether automobiles or household appliances, is the noise environment in the factory.

Industry’s safety programs recognize the economic cost of noise-induced accidents. Noise inhibits the prevention of accidents by obliterating or obscuring warnings or spoken signals and by masking the sounds of mechanical breakdowns. Accidents cost money in time lost, earnings lost, skills lost, medical care, the high cost of death, and the cost of training replacement personnel.

How much productivity is siphoned off by that poor night’s sleep, or by that hour of sleep lost because of the 7:00 A.M. jackhammer and helicopter reveille? At the Noise Control Congress, Dr. A. Huwiler of Zurich described the effect on his patients of loss of sleep because of jet-engine warmup in the early morning:

Stress situations are caused; if they occur in the morning they represent an extremely unfavorable start to the day’s work…An hour of undisturbed sleep every morning, a normal physiological awakening and corresponding fitness every day for tens of thousands of people living near airports, represents an economic factor of great importance.

An analysis of our Upper Sixth Avenue petition-signers showed that office workers in the nearby highrise office buildings were disturbed, as were the staffs of the pharmacy and other specialty shops in the area.

These petitions were signed in June and July of the second year of the subway project, after the offending compressors had been moved underground. One can only guess at the first year’s impact on accuracy, absenteeism, and productivity.

More subtle than errors, but as pervasive, are the work interruptions caused by noise. The whole hierarchy of the corporate office system suffers when noise intrudes.

The dollar cost of noise in some of its aspects is vague, hard to put one’s finger on, although certainly real enough. But the loss in real estate value is plain for all to see.

In the cities, noise is a chief cause of rental turnover in new apartment buildings. Frederick P. Rose, president of a New York building management company, and a one-time delegate to the United Nations Housing Conference, says, “Of all the complaints owners hear, lack of soundproofing heads the list. And this is borne out by the experience of managing agents from coast to coast.”

On Manhattan’s Sixth Avenue, one apartment building had its “Apartments Available” sign out for two years because of the subway extension. It reportedly lost $7,000 a month in vacancies and unrenewed leases. Restaurants and shops in this noise-inundated neighborhood also suffered sales losses as office workers and residents detoured to quieter streets. Even banks reported a decline in off-the-street transactions.

Transportation systems–sub-surface, surface, and in the air–can be most damaging to the value of property. The Canadian government was so concerned about the decline of property values near railroad tracks that it conducted a study of the problem. The research suggested that land zoned “residential” may be depressed below its normal value unless it is 500 to 1,000 feet from the right-of-way. In Sacramento County, California, it was found that foreclosed houses on lots bordering a highway took ten months or more longer to resell than similar foreclosed houses in the same tracts away from a noisy highway.

How does one compute the cost of highway noise, noise so disturbing to sleep that in 1961 eight communities along the New York section of the New England Thruway organized the Thruway Noise Abatement Committee? The local officials felt it was more than worth the $15,000 for noise tests and the four years of time spent in politicking to get New York State to enact the first decibel limit for motor vehicles. Their motivation was the protection of homes near highways, homes the value of which could be as readily depreciated as once were homes near railroad tracks.

The most audible cries of anguish come from people unfortunate enough to own property near airports. Not too many years ago, a Congressional hearing received this list of litigation due to aircraft noise:

Atlanta–73 suits pending for a total of $5 million;

Memphis–20 suits pending, aggregating $2 million;

New York–A suit filed by 808 plaintiffs against 39 airlines and the Port of New York Authority, totaling $1 million;

Seattle–200 suits pending, totaling $1 million;

Los Angeles–38 claims, totaling $1 million.

Other claims in Ontario and San Francisco, California; Dallas; Denver; Houston; Jackson; Oklahoma City; Phoenix; Omaha; Portland, Oregon; San Antonio; Spokane, and Tampa;

Suits threatened in Dayton and Nashville.

This sort of thing goes on all over. In Paris, ten town councils filed suits against Air France and Pan American Airways for noise nuisance, asking damages in the millions, covering costs of soundproofing buildings near Orly Airport. In Norway, 32 homeowners sued the Ministry of Defense and Communications and won 185,000 kroner, about $26,300, for discomfort and property devaluation caused by jet noise.

Cities pay in the deterioration of their neighborhoods. Acoustician Lew Goodfriend hit where it hurts when he observed that the geographically extensive impact of aviation and highway noise affects the entire social and economic structure of the city. “This could be serious if it results in middle and upper class families abandoning neighborhoods, quietly and without fanfare, leaving them to the next lower economic level for whom the neighborhood, noisy or not, is a step upward.”

This deterioration is happening. In Miami, it is reported that because of jet runways built near a housing development, people who could afford to moved away in spite of tax benefits. Whereas earlier the residents of that development represented a median income group of $15,000 to $20,000 a year, in six years the income range dropped to between $7,000 and $8,000.

When supersonic aircraft climb into the wild blue yonder, they send back calling cards in the form of sonic booms. It is reported that in 1965, the Air Force received 3,000 formal complaints, and paid out some $250,000 in reparations. An Interior Department study makes the “conservative estimate [that] the expected continuing annual cost of the repair of damages to houses and other structures, not counting the cost of processing claims or inspection of damages, is at least $35 million, and possibly more than $80 million per year.”

Expensive, isn’t it, this noise business?

How do we begin to estimate the loss in dollars from the loss of the right to be heard? What is the dollar value of an idea lost? How do we tot up the loss in creativity? Creative people are finding it increasingly difficult to function in our noisy cities. A playwright told me, “My mind’s eye has my characters on stage. I’m working out a problem. Suddenly a siren knifes by. The characters leave the stage. It takes me quite a while to get them back on again. I find the city stimulating, but the noise inhibits my output.”

Many writers and other creative people must leave the city to finish an assignment, and the cost is paid not only by the individual, but by the city that is left behind. Many large corporations–and the middle class–have been leaving cities such as New York, fleeing to the “quieter” suburbs. The cities are in bad enough economic shape already, without being further drained by the tyranny of noise.

Noise-ridden city hotels might enjoy a higher occupancy rate if they could provide a quiet night’s sleep. Many exurbanites are starting to write off even the occasional weekend on the town, as did one insurance executive and his wife:

“Alice and I,” he said, “moved to the suburbs to get away from the racket. But we couldn’t live without coming back to the city to do the town, see some plays, eat at a nice restaurant, and stay overnight at a hotel. But we found that the longer we lived in the suburbs, the less we could stand the noise of the city at night. Now we still come in occasionally, but just for a few hours. We go home for a good night’s rest.”

Someone soon will write his Ph.D. dissertation on the cost to society of soundproofing structures to keep out noises from the street and from the skies. Whether it is 2 per cent or 5 per cent or 10 per cent extra, to the cost of noise must be added the cost of sound-conditioning homes, offices, theaters, and motels. Because National Airport in Washington now permits jets, an additional $5 million has to be spent on soundproofing the new Kennedy Cultural Center. Some inkling of the cost of sound-proofing structures near airports is the multi-million dollar lawsuit of the Los Angeles City Unified School District against the Department of Airports, a sum based on the estimated cost of soundproofing the several schools where classroom instruction is interrupted by jet noise.

One builder reported that a sandwich wall of acoustical insulation between its staggered studs may cost $200 more for 1,650 square feet of house. Full carpeting may add another $500. Sound-trapped air conditioning systems are necessary because windows must be kept closed.

One Englishman living near Heathrow Airport double-glazed four windows and fitted three of them with sound-trapped ventilating units developed by the British government. It cost him £258–£120 for the window treatment, £120 for the ventilating units, and £18 for fitting them. The government reimbursed him the sum of £100.

The most costly sound insulation is required by homes near airports. Roofs may have to be insulated, as well as windows. According to one Federal study, it could cost from $260 to $4,500 to sound-insulate a detached house made of light exteriors, and from $260 to $3,400 to sound-insulate a house with heavy exterior walls. Ventilation improvements would be additional.

Premiums for noise abatement are a forced price for survival. Even though it would be dollar-cheaper, communities would not discontinue requiring the pasteurization of milk. We are being forced into the “pasteurization” of unwanted sound along with procedures as routine as those for building safety, fire prevention, and the other protective steps adopted by modern man to make his environment compatible with his needs.

Is it less expensive to develop a quieter form of airplane propulsion, or to insulate thousands of homes near airports? What of the dollar and social costs of relocation for thousands of residents who can’t afford to insulate?

In 1965, after filling my umpteenth prescription for sedatives and buying a new wax-type earplug, I jokingly told my pharmacist that someday drugstores would be barometers of noise assault. Today investigators of the noise problem are seriously considering adopting the sales of earplugs in local drugstores as a guide to the degree of noise stress in non-occupational environments. An informal survey of drugstores near construction sites indicates that as the jackhammers move in, the sales of earplugs and aspirins go up. A good portion of the noise-cost index must be in the $400 million spent annually on headache remedies. Workers are buying incredible quantities of drugs to keep them awake and to put them to sleep. The illegal acquisition and use of stimulants and depressants in industry, especially among production-line workers, is alleged to be so common, according to an article in The New York Times Sunday Magazine, “that to arrest everybody who sold or used them would mean that some plants would have to hire whole new shifts of employees.” If for a given year only one million noise-stressed people took tranquilizers for a conservative 20 weeks at an average cost of $3 a week, this could come to $60 million a year. If more than one million people average more than 20 weeks of tranquilizers, and also take aspirins and sleeping pills, and pep pills to overcome fatigue from noise and poor sleep…

Since noise has been shown to be one cause of hearing loss, some of the money spent on hearing aids must be charged to noise. It has been estimated that between 10 and 15 million Americans need hearing aids for their various types of hearing loss. The Hearing Aid Industry Conference estimates that more than a million and a half Americans do wear hearing aids. The World Health Organization reports that the actual hearing-aid rate in urban areas is estimated to be around 6.8 per 1,000 population, rising from 1.3 per 1,000 persons under 45 years of age to 72.6 per 1,000 persons for those aged 75 and over.

Hearing aids sell for from as little as $75 to as much as $500 for a binaural (two-ear) set. It is impossible to compute what share of this market can be credited to noise, but if six to sixteen million American workers are already deafened, and city noise damages hearing, noise is a good salesman.

Though nothing is known about how many people enter hospitals because of noise-induced illness, the Public Health Service has something to say about the cost of noise once the patient is hospitalized. A PHS report justified expenditures for noise control by informing hospital planners that “added days of hospital care, extended convalescence, or incomplete recovery may result from patient’s insufficient bed rest. Moreover, the monetary loss to the community and to the individual in terms of lost working days from long hospitalization is a further reason for providing quieter hospital conditions.” In other words, expensive hospital stays may be prolonged by noise.

Noise drives one to escape as much as possible. Few of us think of the cost of escape from noise. To economist Sylvia Porter, that house in the country is no longer a luxury for city man, but necessary for his survival. Publishers Weekly describes the conscientious editor as one who has “probably sunk his meager present and future earnings into a quiet little place in the country, where he can work in peace.”

Those who cannot afford the outlay for that country house must pay heavily for periodic escapes. This price goes up as the nearby havens of quiet disappear and only distance offers the hope of fewer decibels. “Refugees from noise,” writes Homer Bigart in The New York Times, “now have somewhere to go.” That “somewhere” is the hotels Laurance Rockefeller has developed in the West Indies and Hawaii, resorts that “woo peace, privacy, and tranquility. None is readily accessible to a city. The poor man is left with ear plugs.”

For those who cannot afford the actual sounds of nature, there are the synthetic “white noise” devices. At a cost of $11.50 you can listen to a recording of something that is supposed to lull like the “swooshing pine-woods winds.” For $69.95 you will get, it is claimed, the magic sound of the sea.

Thousands, perhaps millions of noise victims complain, and many protest to local officialdom. We cannot begin to estimate the cost in energy expended organizing, writing Letters to the Editor, badgering City Hall, petitioning, suing, picketing, and pursuing the noisemaker. This all takes time, and time is money.

City Hall and the noisemaker have found it costs money to reply, to placate. Contractors sometimes assign someone to cope with the protests; the FAA operates a number of local noise abatement offices; politicians must take time out to help constituents. It would have been less costly to install quality mufflers and sound barriers around the compressors and quiet the jackhammers, than to spend time and man-hours to contain the USANAA.

As we continue probing the new concept of environmental quality we will discover that the total cost of excessive noise is something society cannot afford.