Some Beacon Hill residents are hoping for mitigation funding; others want the plane routes to change altogether. Wong and others think the first step is getting proof. Documenting their own experience with noise on Beacon Hill could change hearts and minds — and that’s where the Beacon Hill Noise Team comes in.

Formed in 2018 and led by Roseanne Lorenzana, former Beacon Hill neighborhood councilmember and retired toxicologist with the Environmental Protection Agency, the coalition of neighbors has learned to measure the sound themselves in an effort to prove to the FAA that they should be included in that 65 decibel loop, too.

Crash course in citizen science

It’s the first Wednesday in May, and a group of Beacon Hill citizen scientists have hauled three noise monitors into their neighborhood library’s conference room. The devices each look a little like a handheld GPS or a TV remote with a screen and have a thick metal tube sticking out of the top. They cost $358 apiece. Each just returned from a round of 72-hour monitoring at volunteer houses, and now the team is downloading data and planning where they’ll go next.

“If we can get about 100 [houses], that’s a really nice dataset and that’s enough to show government and other interested entities the impact that noise is having on Beacon Hill,” says Deirdre Curle, one of the volunteers. So far, they’ve recovered data from a little more than half of that.

The seven volunteers in attendance take seats around the table. Among them are the group’s research leaders, Lorenzana and Edmund Seto, an associate professor in the Department of Environmental and Occupational Health Sciences at UW. Seto joined noise efforts in the area in 2016, after researching noise pollution for an EPA grant project spearheaded by Lorenzana and El Centro de La Raza. The other five are volunteers from the neighborhood: Bridget Ferris, Monique Cherrier, Angelo DePaolo, Curle and Wong.

It’s DePaolo’s first meeting. He had been trained to work the monitors the week before and just finished a round of measurements in the front yard of his own home.

“My ears perk up when I hear about groups like the noise team that are interacting with legislators, more than talking over the fence with your neighbor,” he says. “Other than just shake my fist at the sky, I thought, hey, maybe this is a way we can enact some change.”

The Port of Seattle has its own noise-monitoring program, which owns and operates 24 permanent Larson Davis LD831 noise monitors around the Seattle area. These include one sensor in Beacon Hill and another two blocks outside the neighborhood’s borders. Based on this data, the Port contends that noise isn’t increasing a significant amount. Curle believes that most residents think “it’s getting progressively worse.”

Each member has been trained to use the noise monitors, setting them up beside or in a backyard of a volunteer's house, away from disturbances. The monitor records one decibel reading per second for 72 hours until volunteers return to pick them up and recalibrate them. Some members work on the group’s website to map out the results in a series of points that corresponds to the 52 sites monitored so far.

It’s time-consuming: Most of the work done last summer was completed with the help of UW interns paid through the initial EPA grant, which has since ended. Now the group continually seeks funding to keep operations going (although last year Seto and others at UW received funding from the city of Seattle to conduct a noise pollution study for Beacon Hill).

In Beacon Hill, the noise team estimates that a plane flies overhead every 90 to 180 seconds. Bridget Ferris says she remembers going to Jefferson Park to see an outdoor performance of The Lion,The Witch, and The Wardrobe for her son’s summer camp last year. So many planes went by that at one point, they paused the performance to wait them out. “It’s kind of everywhere, you know?”