 Sick of the incessant drone of jackhammers outside your apartment? You could contact the Noise Pollution Clearinghouse for help. (ABCNEWS.com) |
That was five years ago, when the city street sweepers here jarred him awake night after night.
"There's nothing that can make you more angry or irrational," he says. He realized, he says, that noise bothers millions of Americans, and they have few places to turn for help.
So he became an activist. His group, the Noise Pollution Clearinghouse, teaches people how to beat the system if they want some peace and quiet.
"Good neighbors keep their noise to themselves," says Blomberg. "It's just the type of treatment that you would like to receive yourself."
Even in Montpelier, the quaint Vermont city of 8,000 people, Blomberg is surrounded by the din of modern life. The planes, the traffic, the lawn mowers — the things that drive people crazy.
Blomberg may not actually hear all those sounds in downtown Montpelier, but he hears all about them, from frazzled people calling and e-mailing for help. He teaches them how to start petition drives, get politicians on their side, and find local laws that will help them.
"You've submitted comments to the FAA?" he says on the phone to a woman complaining about helicopters that buzz her neighborhood. It turns out she has, just as he suggested.
"There aren't even regulations on how low helicopters can fly," she tells him.
"No, there aren't," he answers. "They can hover right over your roof."
The Noise Pollution Clearinghouse gets about 150 such cases a week, says Blomberg. Many of them come from people who moved to the suburbs to escape the hubbub of the city. Many more come from low-income people who cannot afford to move. You name the complaint — leaf blowers, automobile race tracks, shooting ranges — the clearinghouse staff has heard about all of them.
The U.S. Census Bureau reports that Americans cite noise — more than crime, litter, traffic, or inefficient government — as the biggest problem affecting their neighborhoods. One-hundred thirty-eight million people are regularly exposed to noise levels labeled as excessive by the Environmental Protection Agency.
Often, says Blomberg, solving a noise problem is as simple as asking a neighbor to turn down the radio, or mow the lawn at a more decent hour. But when that neighbor is something big and faceless — a construction site, say, or an airport with a new landing pattern — then you may have a fight on your hands. You may spend many hours at hearings or on the phone to bureaucrats.
Then again, you may get the satisfaction Blomberg got when he couldn't stop those street sweepers back home in Montpelier. After months of going through the system, he got the home phone numbers of city officials. Whenever the street sweepers woke him, he woke them.
Now the streets get cleaned during the day.