An Investigation of Community Attitudes Toward Blast Noise. General Community Survey, Study Site 1

Abstract

Current blast noise assessment procedures at military installations in the United States do not fully meet the military's noise management needs; military blast noise sometimes disturbs surrounding communities, resulting in legal actions against US military installations. Specifically, current procedures do not accurately capture the way humans respond to blast events, and do not adequately account for the level, number, timing, and spatial variability of blast noise events. This work constructed and administered the General Community Survey (GCS) within SERDP Project WP-1546 at the first of three military installations to determine how blast noise levels affect general community annoyance and how the community reaction changes over time in response to a dynamic blast noise environment. The results indicate that, while blast noise was the most annoying noise source around this installation, current blast noise assessment metrics are weakly correlated with community annoyance, and a large percentage of the study population were highly annoyed at relatively low C-weighted Day-Night blast noise levels. Current findings highlight the importance of capturing temporal and spatial variation of the both stimulus and response, and also of non-acoustical factors such as habituation and vibration.

Six Noise Type Military Sound Classifier

“…This results in a large noise footprint, as the typical blast noise event can often be heard at distances as far as 10-20 kilometers from the source. As a result, blast noise is typically reported as the most annoying noise source around military installations [1], and has been the cause of many noise complaints [2] and damage claims. In order to better monitor and assess the noise impact on those exposed to blast noise, the military is in need of reliable noise monitors and accurate blast noise classifiers.…”