If a guy named Griffin had kept his grunter from going rogue 165 years ago, we and our neighbours in the San Juan Islands might not have had to endure this past decade of the Whidbey Island airfield Growlers.
On its surface, the 1859 Pig War was a confrontation about the worth of a pig, owned by San Juan Island British resident Charles Griffin, that had a preference for the potatoes planted on an American neighbour’s farm.
In reality, the campaign was about whether the then-new international boundary fell on the east or west side of the San Juan Islands. The result of the “war,” which saw about 1,400 military personnel and six British warships descend on San Juan Island, was that the distant British government backed down and ceded that group of islands to the U.S. without a second shot being fired.
If Griffin had been a good neighbour and kept his pig corralled, another dispute very likely would have arisen to similar effect.
And even if the boundary had been determined to fall east of the San Juans, the U.S. navy may have still gone on to build air stations and fly obnoxiously loud aircraft in the region.
For the past decade, residents of eastern Greater Victoria, as well as of the San Juan Islands and their neighbouring mainland communities over the border, have endured the noise of the Boeing EA-18G Growler aircraft based at Whidbey Island’s U.S. navy air station.
As often as four days a week, the jets fly loops over the San Juans as pilots practise their touch-and-go landings. More than 110,000 flights occur per year.
Growlers, built for electronic warfare, fly low to jam communications. The noise is immense, around the level of a loud rock concert. Although it’s less intense on this side of the moat, the Growlers still send seismic-like rumbles through the ground — and a person’s innards — and can disrupt sleep and work.
Noise pollution doesn’t stop at geo-political boundaries, but distance certainly helps.
The latest research shows the din presents a significant risk to the health of 74,000 people living closer to the source on Whidbey Island and in nearby communities.
In the study, published this month in the Journal of Exposure Science and Environmental Epidemiology, University of Washington researchers analyzed four weeks of navy-collected acoustic and flight operations data from 2020 and 2021 and earlier data collected by a private acoustics company and the National Park Service.
They then mapped noise exposure across the region to estimate how much noise specific communities were exposed to in an average year.
They found that about two-thirds of residents on Whidbey and Camano islands, including everyone in the cities of Oak Harbor and Coupeville, were exposed to potentially harmful levels of noise, as was 85 per cent of the population of Fidalgo Island’s Swinomish communities. In total, an estimated 74,316 people were exposed to average noise levels that posed a risk of annoyance, 41,089 of whom were exposed to nighttime noise levels that would disrupt sleep.
Another 8,059 people — most of whom lived near the aircraft landing strips — were exposed to noise levels that can permanently damage hearing over time.
Every monitoring station on Whidbey Island measured noise events in excess of 100 decibels when jets were flying. In some instances, noise levels were off the charts — exceeding the limits of models used around the world to predict the health effects of noise exposure.
“Noise exposure has many downstream effects beyond just annoyance and stress — high levels of sleep disturbance, hearing impairment, increased risk of cardiovascular disease — these have real impacts on human health and quality of life,” says study lead author Giordano Jacuzzi.
“We also found that several schools in the area are exposed to levels that have been shown to put children at risk of delayed learning.”
As obnoxious as the Growlers are 40-60 kilometres from the airfields, they’re much worse on and near Whidbey Island.
But when the windows rattle and ground trembles, and I pause to quickly assess “earthquake or the Rumbles?,” I do wish that Charles Griffin had just kept his pig penned.
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