Residents giving regulators earful
2016 brings 419 complaints; state looks into rumble
To find the biggest fault line in the clash of homes and oilfields in Colorado, listen for the rumbles.
“Noise is continuous,” one resident in La Plata County complained to state oil and gas regulators earlier this year.
“My house is vibrating again,” a man in Erie reported.
“I haven’t slept in weeks due to this noise,” another Erie resident complained. “It’s wrong to do this to people.”
Over the past eight years, as houses and well pads inched closer across the state, complaints to the Colorado Oil and Gas Conservation Commission boomed, according to a Denver Post analysis of complaint data.
In 2010, state regulators fielded 240 complaints. By 2013, that number had risen only to 252.
But last year, 419 complaints were filed with the state. Through
July of this year, the tally is already higher — 704 complaints.
The biggest reason for the jump in those complaints is not concern about water safety or fear over explosions. It’s noise. More than one noise complaint per day on average has been filed so far this year.
“It’s intrusive; it really is,” said Matt Lepore, the director of the COGCC, which is in charge of regulating oil and gas production in the state. “You feel like your house is being violated in some kind of way.”
But the COGCC often doesn’t punish noisy oil and gas operators, in part because there is only so much companies can do about it.
The commission’s rules set baseline noise levels that operations aren’t supposed to exceed. But they also provide exemptions for the noisiest activities, such as drilling, that allow for higher levels.
And regulators have no ability to punish companies that repeatedly violate limits for the most pernicious kind of industrial noise — the low, basslike rumblings that are felt as well as heard. The strongest action the rules allow the COGCC to take is ordering a company “to obtain a low frequency noise impact analysis by a qualified sound expert.”
Lepore said, as the number of noise complaints rose, state regulators over a year ago contemplated putting more teeth into that rule and requiring operators to take specific steps to control lowfrequency noise. But officials, after consulting with the industry and noise experts, determined there weren’t any reliable measures that could be ordered.
Following a Colorado State University study and a year-long work group process, the COGCC created a new list of best practices for industry that Lepore described as “helpful hints.”
But there is still no unified plan on how to cut down on low-frequency oil and gas noise, even as complaints pile up. Lepore is trying to persuade major oil and gas players in Colorado, including Anadarko and Encana, to sign onto the new best-practices list.
“I felt that would give it more gravitas within the industry,” Lepore said. “In other words, we needed industry partners saying these are do-able things.”
Homes near sites
In the farmland just north of Erie’s downtown rise the imposing green walls surrounding the Woolley-sosa drilling site. Four miles to the south, two more sites — Waste Connections and Pratt — rise next to neighborhoods.
These three sites account for more than 60 percent of the complaints filed so far this year, and it’s not hard to see why.
Homes sit just across the street from all three sites. Woolley-sosa looms in the background of a community dog park. Waste Connections and Pratt nuzzle up against a neighborhood of halfmillion-dollar homes, a drill rig whining in the background as golfers putt on the second green at the adjacent Colorado National Golf Club.
“Sounds like a diesel truck is running in my driveway again,” one resident near Woolley-sosa complained to the COGCC late last year. “It’s giving me a headache.”
“I cannot sleep due to the constant humming noise outside,” a resident near the Pratt site reported earlier this month.
Those complaints make these three sites some of the most monitored, most mitigated sites in the state’s history. And they show why controlling noise at oil and gas operations is so difficult.
When talking about industrial noise, experts often divide sounds into two groups. There are the higher-frequency sounds that people generally associate with noise — things such as clanging or banging. This is sometimes referred to as “A-scale” noise.
Then there is “C-scale” noise, the lower bass rumblings of motors, fans and shakers.
When Cameron Radtke, an industrial hygienist who in 2014 was in graduate school at Colorado State University, set out that year to measure oil and gas noise in the state, he found that A-scale noise was generally well-controlled. The large walls that surround many sites in northern Colorado, including all three near Erie, do a good job of muffling sound, and the only measurements of A-scale noise he took that exceeded baseline COGCC standards fell within the exemption.
“The major issue that I found,” Radtke said, “is that they didn’t address low-level C-rated noise as well as they should have.”
While those towering barrier walls smother higher-frequency sound waves, lower-frequency waves cut right through. Setback distances are also less reliable in providing a buffer for low-frequency noise. And technology for controlling bass noise has historically lagged.
“There’s some pretty intense engineering that has to go into most of the equipment to control for low-frequency noise,” said Radtke, whose research on oil and gas noise was published this summer in the Journal of Occupational and Environmental Hygiene.
Radtke said it can also be difficult to separate noise caused by oil and gas drilling and noise from other sources.
That creates something of a paradox. Noise complaints, especially near the drilling sites in Erie, are ubiquitous. Residents complain of rattling windows and thrumming sounds that cause headaches and nausea.
But the COGCC, when checking out these complaints, repeatedly finds the noise levels are within the rules. The Town of Erie has hired its own noise consultants. And, while those consultants have found instances when C-scale noise exceeded the COGCC’S limits, they haven’t pinned the noise solely on oil and gas operations, noting that measurements before activity at the site also sometimes spiked above the limits.
“It is possible,” the consultants wrote in a noise-monitoring report for Waste Connections last
Complicated problem
When Donald Behrens, an industrial sound expert who often works with oil and gas companies, talks about noise-control efforts in northern Colorado, he doesn’t talk about it in terms of conflict. Instead, he talks about progress.
Despite the noise complaints — more than 180 at the three sites near Erie so far this year — the oil and gas industry sees the Erie sites as possibly the beginning of a solution to a problem that has bedeviled the industry.
For years, there has been a lack of test data on materials that work to control low-frequency noise, Behrens said. The terrain around a site and the proximity of houses add extra variables. As do the listening humans, who have different tolerances for basslike sounds.
“It’s a complicated problem,” said Behrens, who founded Environmental Noise Control, a California-based company with an office in Longmont. “It gets deeper and deeper as you dive into it.”
But the Erie sites also provide an opportunity for Behrens’ company to field test its newest technology: SK-8, a sound-barrier system that can cut low-frequency noise levels by as much as 20 decibels, Behrens said. New technology in drilling equipment could also cut down on low-frequency noise, he said. The whole industry seems to be focusing more than ever on controlling sound, he said.
So, while homeowners grow more frustrated — “Do you even do anything about these complaints?” a resident near Woolleysosa complained to the COGCC in February — Behrens is growing more optimistic.
“Everybody we talk to every day is working on ways to make things quieter,” Behrens said. “And that’s never happened before.”