As springtime comes, more and more urban dwellers are going to the countryside to hear birds chirp, breathe fresh air, and take time off from their hectic daily routine. However, big cities disregard these rites of spring: there are too many factors that kill the joy of communicating with Mother Nature.
The solid ranks of cars stuck in traffic jams, loud advertising, or construction noise even in the most picturesque nooks of Kyiv are now everyday occurrences. Meanwhile, big city noise is harmful not only to esthetics but health.
Noise is chaotic fluctuation of various origins with a complicated temporal and spectral structure. In common parlance, the word “noise” means any kind of acoustic obstacle to the perception of speech and music, as well as any sounds capable of triggering a negative reaction in the human body.
“Industrial enterprises are one of the main sources of noise that is harmful to people,” says Volodymyr Akimenko, head of the civil construction noise hygiene laboratory at the Marzeyev Institute of Public Hygiene and Medical Ecology. “When it is constantly noisy in a workplace, a person’s hearing analyzer temporarily lowers the perception threshold, so the individual does not react to this noise.
“But later, when the irritatant disappears, the perception threshold goes back to normal. But when abnormal levels of noise persist for a long time, it gradually becomes impossible to restore the original condition, and the individual suffers hearing loss.”
The same thing occurs in noisy offices next to major highways, in the subway, and near railroads and airports. A city’s acoustic environment is linked to public transport. For example, according to the Municipal Environmental Hygiene Station, the noise level exceeds the norm several times over on such Kyivan thoroughfares as Khreshchatyk, Lesia Ukrainka, and Taras Shevchenko boulevards, Peremohy and Chervonozoriany avenues, Velyka Vasylkivska and Saksahanskoho streets.
People who work near heavily traveled roads are exposed more than others to nervous, endocrine, and cardiovascular disorders as well as to heart attacks. In noisy places the human hearing analyzer receives and processes all the available information, searching for but failing to find a useful component.
This analytical activity requires a lot of energy, and when there are no expected results, stress is created. Scientists have proved that constant noise impairs sleeping, lowers work efficiency, distorts language communication, impairs children’s upbringing, and always affects people’s health.
Almost all airports tend to impair health. Air transport safety is still on the drawing board: experts are assessing the noise level of various types of planes, frequency of flights, and housing construction limits in an airport’s vicinity. The same applies to railroads: since noise pollution seriously affects human health near railway stations and sorting yards, it is not recommended to live in such areas. Hygiene regulations list areas where it is prohibited to construct residential buildings, but there are still housing developments near Boryspil and Zhuliany airports.
“To a certain degree this resulted from inconsistent governmental policies,” Akimenko says. “A few years ago they were going to move Zhuliany. When the decision was made, the city had already reached the airfield. But the airport is still there: people continue to live in the area and airplanes are continuing to fly. There is also a residential neighborhood near Boryspil, populated by people who are not badly off. They are not aware of the harm being done to them because a considerable number of Ukrainian airplanes do not meet international noise standards.”
To maintain a permissible noise level on streets, it is important to keep adjusting the correlation of various vehicles on the road, their speed, and the frequency of stops, as well as to consider the quality of road surfaces, etc. While Ukrainian legislation does not set out standards for such details, so important for motor transport, elsewhere in Europe motorists have to pay a certain fee to go downtown. Ukrainian cities still have a long way to go, for they have not even learned to ensure that houses are not built near sources of noise pollution.
In the past few years small private businesses have created another problem. Owners often use inappropriate premises to set up production areas. They simply buy as large an apartment as they need and install a printing machine, for example, which makes the whole building rattle. Non-stop noise, which does not let anyone relax, also comes from many built-in household appliances, such as air conditioners, transformers, and heating systems. In addition, entertainment establishments, such as around-the-clock or night bars and discotheques are increasingly making their appearance in residential neighborhoods.
Akimenko says that residents of an apartment house on Chervonohvardiyska Street began to complain about noise only when a discotheque was opened across the street, because they had already gotten used to the rattle of streetcars, the subway, and trucks.
Global noise standards are constantly rising: whereas a few years ago people were advised to protect their hearing at 80 dBA, now the critical line is 55-65. It is not enough to establish certain standards to save the health of Ukrainians: one must also learn to separate housing developments from transportation arteries, produce low-noise automobiles, put up green screens, noise-resistant and noise-proof structures along railroads, etc.
According to the Law of Ukraine “On Introducing Amendments to Some Legislative Acts of Ukraine on the Protection of the Population from the Impact of Noise,” residents of apartment houses should also treat each other with consideration, e.g., by informing their neighbors about the time and dates of renovations.
However, it is practically impossible to adhere to strict sound pollution standards in Ukraine because it is impossible to draw a line between business and housing owing to high land and real estate prices. Nor is it possible to invent an instrument for measuring human irritation caused by one kind of loud noise or another. For the time being Ukrainians will have to sacrifice their own health on their way to Europe.
THE DAY’S DATA
Decibel is a universal, dimension-free logarithmic unit of measurement. A three-decibel (dBA) difference means that the value being measured twice exceeds the standard; a six-dBA and ten-dBA difference means a fourfold and tenfold excess, respectively, and so on. So you can say that the boa from a popular animated film is bigger than the parrot by about 16 dBA because you can assess the difference without knowing the precise length of either the boa or the parrot.
Decibels are convenient for assessing the efficacy of practically all actions: they immediately show the “before” and “after” difference in relative values. This means that every individual should have a list of hazardous noises. Some can be generalized and compared. For example, 10 dBA is breathing and whispering, 20-30 dBA is everyday noise inside a residential building, 40 dBA is a quiet conversation or the noise of a kitchen range exhaust hood, 50 dBA is a moderately loud conversation or noise in a room facing the street, 70 dBA is the noise of a typewriter, 80 dBA is the noise of a truck engine and rush-hour traffic, 100 dBA is a loud car horn five to seven meters away, the sound of passing train, or orchestral music, 120 dBA is the noise of a tractor one meter away or a jet engine, and 140 dBA is a rifle shot. Sounds exceeding 160-180 decibels can rupture the ear membrane.
