Buddy and the Airport Buffer Zone

Let’s say you had a buddy who was a drummer. Your buddy, when he wasn’t out playing massive stadium concerts, liked to practice his drumming, nice and loud, pretty much 24/7.

This buddy lived outside the city, where he’d never bothered anyone with his constant bashing and crashing. But the land around his drum studio was owned by developers who decided one day that it was prime property. The developers built lovely, stately homes all around Buddy’s place, and lots of blissfully unaware folks, who had been looking forward to the peace and quiet of their new country abodes, moved in, only to discover fairly quickly that Buddy was one noisy neighbour.

Complaints were lodged. Buddy was forced to reduce his drumming hours. Soon, no amount of drumming was acceptable. “These are our homes,” the neighbours insisted. “Your constant drumming is lowering our property values!” “But I was here before you came,” Buddy argued, weakly. “Didn’t anyone mention the drumming before you moved in?”

Somewhere in this analogy, I should try to work in the fact that more than 12,000 jobs and over 1.2 billion dollars are generated by businesses related to Buddy’s drumming. You can use your imagination for that part.

Perhaps you see where I’m going with this. It’s the kind of scenario the Halifax International Airport Authority is trying to prevent with its suggestion that future development in specific areas around the airport should be limited. The concern is that, if large numbers of people take up residence under the flight paths, there will most certainly be noise complaints from those residents.

But both Paul Pettipas of the Nova Scotia Homebuilders’ Association, and Halifax Regional Councillor Steve Streatch object to this idea, using a arguments so circular they make the head spin.

“We would certainly question why the airport would need a buffer when they have no complaints,” Mr. Pettipas points out in a recent article in the Chronicle Herald. He then goes on to rail about “the rights of landowners.”

Councillor Streatch’s argument is equally worthy of a good head-scratch. “The noise,” he has been quoted as saying, “has never been an issue.” So, why would allowing a lot more people to live there result in an increase in complaints?

Gentlemen, may I direct your attention to the cities of Toronto, Ottawa, Hamilton, Victoria, Waterloo, Vancouver… and very likely every single metropolitan airport which is surrounded by residential development? The handling of noise complaints is, by necessity, a routine part of the management of these airports, and it impacts the way they do business.

I will even go out on a limb and suggest that some of the citizens who file noise complaints moved into those areas knowing full well that there was an airport nearby.

Can we not learn from the experience of other cities? A study done over a decade ago for the Waterloo airport said: “One of the most effective insulators against annoying sound is distance. If possible, an airport should be surrounded by a noise buffer area of vacant or forested land, and private property near the high noise impact area…should be used for activities that are less sensitive to noise.

“Proper planning … may protect the quality of life for those living or working next to an airport, as well as protect the investment and operation of the airport.”

Proactive planning or denial and wishful thinking? We can let Buddy keep drumming and driving the local economy, or we can move in and force him to take up the tambourine.