Rudman's city: Motorway noise empties bedrooms

By BRIAN RUDMAN

Before the victorious pro-roaders like John Banks and Michael Barnett throw their bulldozers into first gear they should be forced to spend a week sleeping over at Russell and Iris Craig's Manurewa home.

It would be a good first-hand lesson to them about the true cost of motorway building - a price that goes way beyond the dollars needed for earthmoving and tar sealing.

They will have to get their own breakfast, though, because the Craigs can't sleep at home any more. The noise from the adjacent Southern Motorway over the past nine months has been so bad that the pensioner couple now drive off in their campervan each night to find a quiet spot to rest their noise-addled heads.

The irony is that the Craigs - and dozens of neighbours - are innocent victims of an attempt by officialdom to abate motorway noise. However, so inexperienced are our road builders and council officials in trying to block the noise pollution coming from their highways, that this experiment has been a disaster.

The noise-barrier is the $300,000, 3.5m by 440m reflective steel monstrosity put up last January to protect the regional botanical gardens at Manurewa. Within the gardens, the trees and staff were delighted with the drop in traffic noise. Across the motorway in residential Manurewa it was a different story.

Instead of absorbing the noise as had been promised, the steel barrier acted as a reflector, bouncing the sounds away from the botanic gardens back across the motorway and up into the homes above and beyond.

Within days the complaints were pouring in to the Manukau City Council, whose planning officials had nodded the wall through without a public hearing. As the demands for the wall to come down increased, Manukau City wrote to the park owners, the Auckland Regional Council, saying non-notified permission had been granted because the ARC's acoustic advisers had submitted that "there would be no noticeable acoustic effect for dwellings on the opposite side of the motorway" as a result of the wall.

The letter suggested that since the advice had been misleading, the application be reheard. The ARC rejected that and the official duck-shoving began.

Just how the experts from either council thought a hard metal wall wouldn't reflect sound is beyond me. What we do know is that no acoustic readings were taken of the existing noise levels across the motorway before construction began. I guess if you were confident there would be no harmful effects, you wouldn't see the need.

But now the problem has arisen, the experts are left floundering with nothing but the complaints of the aggrieved to go by. The Craigs certainly know what they can hear or feel - for at night they say it's more a vibration coming through their pillows.

They have lived in their home, 350m to 400m back from the motorway, for more than eight years and it never worried them until the wall was built. They are both now near breaking point, lately having to spend six weeks away on holiday on a doctor's orders.

"I've got permanent ringing in my ears now," says Mr Craig. "I thought I was going nuts when I started to break down on the phone. I've been a construction foreman and had to be fairly hard. I just went to a watery mess."

He says "a motorbike will give you absolute gip. You hear them come along the motorway as a faint noise then they hit that wall and it's like turning the amplifier up".

Both the city and regional councils concede there is a problem. However, solving it is taking much longer than creating it. A focus group of officials and locals is meeting. Acousticians are busy measuring sound levels.

The locals' solution is simple - demolish the wall. The ARC says that would cost $100,000 and is not an option. Instead it wants to mount an absorbent board of concrete and wood-wool just out from the existing metal wall. That will cost $70,000 to $80,000 and, they believe, do the trick. In the meantime, tests continue and so do the deliberations.

If the focus group agrees, then it's off to the politicians for approval. That won't be until late November or December.

The Craigs, whose request for quiet interim accommodation has been rejected by both the city and the region, continue to play night gypsies. As for the pro-roaders, from them not a peep has been heard.