Letters

I would like to follow up Anna Brinsmade’s excellent letter, where she documents the amount of noise she is subjected to [“When Will It End?” Letters, September 26].

Today, my neighbor’s landscaper, who hypocritically claims on his trucks to have gone all electric, was using blowers whose noise reached 93 dB. According to the World Health Organization, noise levels above 45 dB are associated with adverse health effects. (Every 10 dB represents a tenfold increase in sound power.) The police, on the other hand, advised me that leaf blowers are exempt from the noise code no matter how loud they are.

Anna has several suggestions to mitigate the problem, but I believe the solution is simple: Equipment making noise louder than 50 dB should be banned.

It is possible that the interests of the landscaping industry were permitted to prevail to this unreasonable extent when our community was populated mostly on weekends. This is no longer the case, and it is absolutely shameful that our elected representatives allow this intolerable and barbaric scourge to persist.

Roni Detoledo

Bridgehampton