Last week. Work day. Sunny and 65 degrees. It feels awesome. I had been really sick and was still really recovering, but I can't really afford to be sick anyways. Really, the sunshine was making me feel better. Then I start to hear the loudest, most godawful drone. The folks across the street have a yard crew with two leaf blowers. It's painfully loud from at least this far away, if not just painfully annoying. This is what makes me long to blast someone. But I wouldn't shoot Paco and Juan. They're just poor dudes trying to feed their families. I'd kick the door in and fire on the homeowners in my fantasy world without consequences.Leafblowers? really? is that worth somone losing a face over? I think so. Many reasons.
1. Louder than holy god.
Like a retarded bumble bee mic'ed and pumped through a 2000 watt amp at full volume. and droning. I once read a study on the correlation between areas with a lot of noise and cases of insanity. like people that live under flight paths. Or restaraunt cooks with the all the refrigerators and things humming everywhere. I've known a lot of cooks. batshit crazy. Noise interferes with communication, sleep, and work. The U.S. EPA says noise degrades quality of life by impairing communication and social interaction; reducing the accuracy of work, particularly complex tasks; and creating stressful levels of frustration and aggravation that last even when the noise has ceased.
The normally acceptable ambient noise level in residential areas is no more than 60 dB; 60-70 is conditionally acceptable; and higher levels are normally unacceptable. The decibel scale is logarithmic--each increase of 10, say 60 to 70, represents a noise 10 times louder.
The average blower measures 70-75 dB at 50 feet, thus louder at any closer distance. Leaf blowers are routinely used less than 50 feet from unconsenting pedestrians and neighboring homes that may be occupied by home workers, retirees, day sleepers, children, the ill or disabled, and pets.
The World Health Organization recommends general daytime outdoor noise levels of 55 dBA* or less, but 45 dBA to meet sleep criteria. Thus, even a 65-decibel leaf blower would be 100 times too loud** to allow healthful sleep (which often takes place during daytime hours for night workers and others). Noise can impair sleep even when the sleeper is not awakened.
Acoustics experts say blower noise is especially irritating because of its particular pitch, the changing amplitude, and the lack of control by the hearer.
Also, the leaf blowers are harmful to the ears of the operators. There's going to be a lot of deaf Juans out there. A blower measuring 70-75 dB at 50 feet can reach 90-100 dB at the operator's ear. OSHA requires hearing protection for noise over 85.
2. regular pollution.
Emissions from the two-stroke combustion engine include particlate matter (PM) as well as gaseous carbon monoxide, nitrogen oxides, and hydrocarbons (CO, NOx, and HC). Leaf blowers also raise (entrain) dust from the ground. And evaporative emissions of fuel occur during the refueling process, which sometimes spills gas on the operators, and from the fuel tank.
Fine PM2.5 particles, which are man-made and do not occur in nature, evade the body's defense systems. According to the EPA and ARB they can increase the number and severity of asthma attacks, cause or aggravate bronchitis or other lung disease, and reduce our ability to fight infections.
Leaf blower motors are inordinately large emitters of CO, NOx, HC, and PM. Two-stroke engine fuel is a gasoline-oil mixture, thus especially toxic.According to the Lung Association, a leaf blower causes as much smog as 17 cars.
Street dust includes lead, organic carbon, and elemental carbon according to a study conducted for the ARB. The Lung Association states "the lead levels are of concern due to [their] great acute toxicity... Elemental carbon...usually contains several adsorbed carcinogens." Another study found arsenic, cadmium, chromium, nickel, and mercury in street dust as well. The ARB states that a leaf blower creates 2.6 pounds of PM10 dust emissions per hour of use.
The EPA and ARB, in their brochure "Particulate Matter Air Pollution: A threat to our health" advise us, "Avoid using leaf blowers."
3. It's pointless and in fact, counter productive to the way nature works.
People are stupid. Nature however is not and had this whole system worked out. You see, trees drop their leaves in the fall. The leaves decay and enrich the soil, which the same tree gets it's nutrients from. It's a beautiful cycle whose purpose I understood when I was 3. When you take the leaves away, You're taking the tree's ability to feed itself. Now, the poor uneducated saps running the leaf blowers might not know this, but the homeowner with the nice job that can afford lawn service should. And it's not like people are out enjoying their yards anymore anyways. They're inside eating Cheetos and watching wrestling or pawn stars or some shit. So, the main motivating force in having a kempt lawn is vanity. keeping up with the joneses. giving a shit what your shitty neighbors think. And then they pay money for fertilizers for their yard. Some polluting corporation is taking your money and poisoning the earth because you wont allow nature to do what it does for free, and every once in a while you want to raise your head up from your mayonnaise trough and look out the window and see some neat, orderly bastardization of nature.
When did we decide that leaves were offensive? I have never been offended by leaves on the ground. Or any plants for that matter. my family always wanted me to spray poison on the ground to kill weeds. really? You're so offended by a plant that you'll dump something toxic on the ground. and bugs eat the plants and birds eat the bugs and cats eat the birds. Is your head so far up your ass that you can't grasp this concept? Of course the people in my family that wanted to throw poison on the ground were so naive that they believed that anything a company could sell you at a store could not possibly be harmful to anything. big corporations only have out best interests in mind, right?I had a roommate for a while that would be offended by grass growing up between the cracks in the concrete and pine trees dropping needles in our front yard. I loved theses things, especially the little bit of grass. "It may take me a long fucking time, but slowly and steadily, I'm gonna bust this fucking concrete that you assholes put here."
4. Resources for disposal
At the end of the day there was about 30 garbage bags full of leaves on the curb. Trash bags are made from petroleum. Do I need to tell you how shitty our constant need for petroleum is? probably. You're stupid as fuck. Then it takes crews of men (that we have to pay) to load up all these bags and drive them all to the dump where they're dumped with all the inorganic matter, making a stew of toxic nauseous methane. Ever been to a city dump? everyone should have to go for educational purposes. There's two here in town that I have to go to frequently. I call them mount st. garbage. They stink. You'll smell it for days after you leave. There's buzzards and sometimes sea gulls (yes in Memphis) and those annoying plastic grocery bags are blowing around everywhere.5. Clogged Storm Drains
There's always some asshole blowing all the leaves into the street. You ever been driving just to have some shithead blow leaves and dirt all over your car? I like to drive as close to them as I can without hitting them and try to blow that shit right back at them.
The yard crew finally left and I sighed with relief only to discover a block away there were two more fucking leaf blowers going.
