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...