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Jul. 21st, 2012 08:19 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
conulySevere Drought Expected to Worsen
It has a nifty picture of droughts over the past several decades
The drought that has settled over more than half of the continental United States this summer is the most widespread in more than half a century. And it is likely to grow worse.
The latest outlook released by the National Weather Service on Thursday forecasts increasingly dry conditions over much of the nation’s breadbasket, a development that could lead to higher food prices and shipping costs as well as reduced revenues in areas that count on summer tourism. About the only relief in sight was tropical activity in the Gulf of Mexico and the Southeast that could bring rain to parts of the South.
The unsettling prospects come at a time of growing uncertainty for the country’s economy. With evidence mounting of a slowdown in the economic recovery, this new blow from the weather is particularly ill-timed.
Already some farmers are watching their cash crops burn to the point of no return. Others have been cutting their corn early to use for feed, a much less profitable venture.
“It really is a crisis. I don’t think we’ve ever seen anything like this in my lifetime,” Gov. Pat Quinn of Illinois said after touring ravaged farms in the southern part of the state.
The government has declared one-third of the nation’s counties — 1,297 of them across 29 states — federal disaster areas as a result of the drought, which will allow farmers to apply for low-interest loans to get them through the disappointing growing season.
“It’s got the potential to be the worst drought we’ve ever had in Arkansas,” said Butch Calhoun, the state’s secretary of agriculture. “It’s going to be very detrimental to our economy.”
What is particularly striking about this dry spell is its breadth. Fifty-five percent of the continental United States — from California to Arkansas, Texas to North Dakota — is under moderate to extreme drought, according to the government, the largest such area since December 1956. An analysis released on Thursday by the United States Drought Monitor showed that 88 percent of corn and 87 percent of soybean crops in the country were in drought-stricken regions, a 10 percent jump from a week before. Corn and soybean prices reached record highs on Thursday, with corn closing just over $8.07 a bushel and soybeans trading as high as $17.49.
As of Sunday, more than half of the corn in seven states was in poor or very poor condition, according to the Department of Agriculture. In Kentucky, Missouri and Indiana, that figure is above 70 percent. Over all, only 31 percent of the nation’s corn is in good to excellent condition, compared with 66 percent at the same time last year.
“We’re expecting significant reductions in production potential yield, potential for corn and soybeans in particular,” said Brad Rippey, a meteorologist with the Department of Agriculture.
The withering corn has increased feed prices and depleted available feeding land, putting stress on cattle farmers. A record 54 percent of pasture and rangeland — where cattle feed or where hay is harvested for feeding — was in poor or very poor condition, according to the Department of Agriculture. Many farmers have been forced to sell their animals.
Because feed can account for nearly half of a cattle farmer’s costs, consumers could see a rise in the price of meat and dairy products, experts said. The high sustained heat has led the key components in milk, like fat and protein, to plummet more than usual, said Chris Galen, a spokesman for National Milk Producers Federation.
“This is due to cows eating less dry matter, and drinking more water ... which tends to thin out the resulting milk output,” he said in an e-mail. “So, if you’re a cheese maker, you need to use a little more milk to get the same volume of cheese output.”
Still, this year’s drought is not expected to be as rough on Midwestern agriculture as the one in 1988. Corn yields were 22 percent under trend that year, and this year the Department of Agriculture is projecting yields 11 percent under trend — “though that could change in August,” said Joseph W. Glauber, the department’s chief economist.
Many also believe that farmers are better situated this year to handle the impact of a drought than they were two decades ago. More than 80 percent of corn and soybeans are estimated to be insured, Mr. Glauber said.
Last year, crop insurers paid a record $11 billion in indemnity payments, and that “should serve as a good model for what farmers can expect this year,” Tom Zacharias, the president of National Crop Insurance Services, said in a news release.
But the impact of this drought has extended beyond farming. In Missouri, the torrid conditions have sparked forest fires that resemble the types of wildfires seen in the West. Already, 117 wildfires have burned in Missouri’s Mark Twain National Forest, a record-setting pace. Conditions have been so dry that there was a report of hay in a barn combusting on its own.
Meanwhile, water levels are falling in town reservoirs as well as major waterways like the Mississippi and Ohio Rivers. Barge and towboat operators have been reducing the size of their loads because of the low water, said Ann M. McCulloch, a spokeswoman for the American Waterways Operators. This means shipping operators, who transport a variety of goods from crops to gravel, have had to take more trips, increasing transportation costs that could be passed on to consumers.
Officials in Augusta, Kan., estimate that they have 110 days worth of water that they can draw from a nearby reservoir. The primary reservoir used for their municipal water supply dropped too low last year, the result of a drought in the area that started two years ago, said Josh Shaw, the assistant to the city manager. Indianapolis has put restrictions on water use; south of the city, Johnson County banned smoking at the county fair.
In Colorado, there is concern that the drought could damage forage that deer, elk and other game feed on in the fall. But the state also has seen advantages from the drought. Lower water levels have been helpful for fly fishing, and, with fewer places for animals to drink water, they will likely gather in concentrated areas, making conditions better for hunting.
And one Indianapolis painter is making the best of the situation, according to The Indianapolis Star, by starting a new arm of his business: painting brown lawns green.
Cameras Are Cyclists’ ‘Black Boxes’ in Accidents
When Evan Wilder went flying onto the pavement during his bicycle commute one morning here, he didn’t have time to notice the license plate of the pickup truck that had sideswiped him after its driver hurled a curse at him. Nor did a witness driving another car.
But the video camera Mr. Wilder had strapped to his head caught the whole episode. After watching a recording of the incident later, Mr. Wilder gave the license plate number to the police and a suspect was eventually charged with leaving the scene of an accident.
“Without the video, we wouldn’t know who did it,” said Mr. Wilder, 33, who was bruised and scraped in the crash.
Cyclists have long had a rocky coexistence with motorists and pedestrians, who often criticize bike riders for a confrontational attitude, and for blowing through stop signs or otherwise exempting themselves from the rules of the road. Now small cameras — the cycling equivalent of the black box on an airplane — are becoming an intermediary in the relationship, providing high-tech evidence in what is sometimes an ugly contest between people who ride the roads on two wheels and those who use four.
Video from these cameras has begun to play an invaluable role in police investigations of a small number of hit-and-runs and other incidents around the country, local authorities say. Lawyers who specialize in representing bicyclists say they expect the use of cameras for this purpose to increase as awareness of the devices goes up and their prices, now starting at around $200, come down.
Some riders even argue that the technology will encourage cyclists to keep themselves in check during dust-ups with drivers.
“I know my actions before and after some event are going to be recorded if I’m the one being a jerk,” Mr. Wilder said. “It makes me want to be careful.”
Bicyclists say cameras can also deter motorist harassment, a problem that many complain about and that cities like Los Angeles and Berkeley, Calif., have sought to combat with new laws.
“It’s a fact of life that on American roads that you get punked, cut off purposely, harassed, not once but on a regular basis,” said Bob Mionske, a former Olympic cyclist who is now a lawyer representing bicyclists in Portland, Ore. “If motorists start to hear about bikes having cameras, they’re going to think twice about running you off the road.”
Gary Souza, a cyclist in Sacramento, said something like that happened to him. He wears a camera on his helmet during his 50-minute commute each way between his home and office. He began riding with the device this year after buying a $7,000 velomobile, a three-wheeled recumbent cycle with a shell around it.
“Even though it’s insured, if anything happens I figured I wanted to get it on camera,” said Mr. Souza, who works in information technology for the state of California.
A couple of months ago, Mr. Souza said, a motorist became upset after the cyclist crossed in front of his vehicle to make a turn. The driver got out of his car to confront Mr. Souza, who pointed to the camera on his head.
“I said, ‘Don’t be stupid,’ ” Mr. Souza said. “He quickly ran back to his car. I’m certain I avoided a couple blows.”
The new cameras, which have started to catch on in the last few years, are meant for shooting video and photos while skiing, surfing and doing other sports. Likewise, many cyclists use them to memorialize their rides.
GoPro and Contour make popular models; GoPro says sales through bike retailers have nearly doubled so far this year from the same period last year.
One of the most prominent bicycle crash videos so far was recorded in April by two Brazilian riders who were climbing the hills of Berkeley when a black car knocked them down and sped off. Neither bicyclist was seriously injured, according to the Berkeley police. The video of the crash has been viewed more than 362,000 times on YouTube.
The Berkeley police identified the car’s license plate and later found the man the vehicle was registered to. They believe he falsely reported his car stolen to cover up for the driver of the car and are still investigating the incident, said Capt. Andrew Greenwood, a spokesman for the police.
On a recent Friday evening, as the streets of downtown Washington were jammed with cars heading home, Mr. Wilder pedaled away wearing a camera on his forehead, looking like a spelunker wearing a headlamp. He scooted between parked cars and traffic on the road, sometimes with less than a foot of space between him and moving vehicles.
The video Mr. Wilder shot of his crash in Washington, which occurred last August, at first did not seem as if it would help much in tracking down the motorist who had struck him. But Mr. Wilder, who works in the photography department of National Geographic, examined the video frame by frame until he discovered a clear picture of the vehicle’s license plate, captured while he was lying on the ground.
The District of Columbia’s office of the attorney general charged the motorist, John W. Diehl, with leaving the scene of an accident. Federal prosecutors, who handle felony cases in the district, are also looking into the case.
Mr. Diehl’s lawyer, Adam R. Hunter, declined to comment. Mr. Diehl has pleaded not guilty, said a spokesman for the attorney general.
Mr. Wilder said, “Most cyclists don’t use cameras so Mr. Diehl may have assumed he could assault and drive away anonymously.”
Working or Playing Indoors, New Yorkers Face an Unabated Roar
The waitress’s lips were moving but nothing seemed to be coming out. Hundreds of voices swallowed her words as a D.J. pumped out a ticka ticka of dance beats. The happy hour-fueled din rose with it, amplified by tin ceilings and tiled walls.
“I’ve been getting migraines,” the waitress shouted on a recent Thursday night, leaning in to be heard. She said that she woke up with her ears buzzing, and that her doctor had recently prescribed seizure medicine: “It decreases the amount of headaches you get.”
The restaurant, Lavo in Midtown Manhattan, is not just loud but often dangerously so. On that night, the noise averaged 96 decibels over the course of an hour, as loud as a power mower, and a level to which, by government standards, workers should not be exposed for more than three and a half hours without protection for their hearing.
Lavo is far from alone. Across New York City, in restaurants and bars, but also in stores and gyms, loud noise has become a fact of life in the very places where people have traditionally sought respite from urban stress. The New York Times measured noise levels at 37 restaurants, bars, stores and gyms across the city and found levels that experts said bordered on dangerous at one-third of them.
At the Brooklyn Star in Williamsburg, the volume averaged 94 decibels over an hour and a half — as loud as an electric drill. At the Standard Hotel’s Biergarten in the meatpacking district, where workers can log 10-hour shifts, the noise level averaged 96 decibels. No music was playing: the noise was generated by hundreds of voices bouncing off the metal skeleton of the High Line.
At Beaumarchais, a nightclub-like brasserie on West 13th Street, the music averaged 99 decibels over 20 minutes and reached 102 in its loudest 5 minutes. “It definitely takes a toll,” a waiter said.
Workers at these places said the sound levels, which were recorded over periods as long as an hour and a half, were typical when they were working.
One spin class at a Crunch gym on the Upper West Side averaged 100 decibels over 40 minutes and hit 105 in its loudest 5. At a Crunch gym in Park Slope, Brooklyn, the noise level averaged 91 decibels. At the Fifth Avenue flagship store of Abercrombie & Fitch, which has designed many of its stores to resemble nightclubs, pulsating music hit 88 decibels, just shy of the limit at which workers are required to wear protection if exposed to that volume for eight hours.
By way of comparison, a C train hurtling downtown in Manhattan registered at 84 decibels; normal conversation is from 60 to 65 decibels.
Some research has shown that people drink more when music is loud; one study found that people chewed faster when tempos were sped up. Armed with this knowledge, some bars, retailers and restaurants are finely tuning sound systems, according to audio engineers and restaurant consultants.
“Think about places where they’re trying to get you in and out as quickly as possible,” said John Mayberry, an acoustical engineer in San Marino, Calif., who has railed against what he terms the “weaponization” of audio. “It’s real obvious what their intentions are.”
Some customers like the loudness. Younger people can withstand loud music longer, while older ones may run from it, helping proprietors maintain a youthful clientele and a fresh image.
But repeated exposure to loud noise often damages hearing and has been linked to higher levels of stress, hypertension and heart disease. Some restaurateurs said they were surprised that their decibel levels were too high, and a few said they were taking remedial measures.
Indeed, employees at noisy places are often the most affected, yet enforcement of existing noise regulations is almost nonexistent at places like these.
The Occupational Safety and Health Administration, which is responsible for workplace noise, generally investigates only when complaints are made; this appears to happen rarely, if ever, when it comes to restaurants, bars and gyms (the agency said it would take 138 years to inspect every workplace in the United States). In the 2011 fiscal year, all of the 14 noise violations issued by OSHA in New York City went to construction sites or factories; none went to restaurants, clubs or bars. The city has a noise code, but in the cases of restaurants and bars, it applies only to music and thumping that annoy the neighbors.
OSHA requires workers to wear hearing protection if they are exposed to 90-decibel noise for eight hours; at 85 decibels, employers must provide ear protection and conduct hearing tests.
Many hearing loss prevention experts say, however, that people should not be exposed to 100 decibels — the level at the spin class on the Upper West Side — for more than 15 minutes without hearing protection.
“We definitely consider those levels able to cause damage and likely to cause permanent damage with repeated exposure,” said Laura Kauth, an audiologist and president of the National Hearing Conservation Association. “They’re experiencing industrial level noise.”
But at all the aforementioned places, there was nary an earplug in sight.
Hearing experts say ears never get used to loud noise. “Your ears don’t get more tolerant,” said Dr. Gordon Hughes, director for clinical trials at the National Institute on Deafness and Other Communication Disorders. “Your psyche gets more tolerant.”
The background noise is too loud, Dr. Hughes said, if a person’s voice has to be raised to be heard by someone three feet away. Signs of too much exposure include not hearing well after the noise stops, a ringing sound and feeling as if the ears are under pressure or blocked. None of these symptoms necessarily mean the damage is permanent, though even if hearing seems restored to normal, damage may have been done. Yet hearing loss from noise typically takes months or even years to develop.
One waiter at Lavo, who, like several other workers, did not want his name published for fear of losing his job, said he knew his hearing could be in jeopardy. But, he reasoned, slight hearing loss was inevitable, since he had also played in a band. “When it happens, it happens,” he shrugged. “Hopefully by that time they’ll have better fixes for it.”
Rick Neitzel, an assistant professor at the University of Michigan Risk Science Center, said full-time employees subjected to the volumes found at Lavo and Beaumarchais for a year or two could easily incur hearing loss. “Restaurants in the high 90s,” Dr. Neitzel said, “something really should be done.”
Tailoring the Clientele
At the Abercrombie flagship on a recent afternoon, a preteen girl plunged wide-eyed into the darkness as loud beats poured from dozens of speakers. Her mother and her grandmother trailed her. The grandmother, Nancy Hilem, 56, of Bucks County, Pa., said they had been in the shop 10 minutes but it felt as if it had been an hour because of the noise. Normally calm — she works at a funeral parlor — Ms. Hilem found herself jumpy.
“I can’t concentrate,” she said. “I can’t focus on what I want to buy because of the noise. I want to say to her, ‘Just find something, I’ll buy anything, let’s just get out!’ ”
According to Mr. Mayberry, that is exactly what Abercrombie wants: for loud music to keep out older people while teenagers venture in with their parents’ credit cards. “You can control your audience,” he said. “If you want young people in there, give them a specific type of sound.”
Abercrombie is but one example. Hollister, another Abercrombie brand, and H&M also go after the young: in their SoHo stores, volume levels stretched into the high 80s and often the low 90s.
Brian McKinley, vice president for marketing at DMX, the sensory branding company that creates Abercrombie’s playlists, said the goal was to create an “aspirational” environment. Throbbing music and dim lights make youngsters feel as if they are in a club and entice them to stay longer.
“There’s a lot of studies out there showing that the more time spent in the store correlates to more items purchased,” Mr. McKinley said. An Abercrombie spokesman said in a statement that the company’s “unique A&F in-store experience is something that our customer wants.”
Several Abercrombie employees admitted to frequent headaches. One said she hid out in the stock room to get away from the noise.
“We can’t do anything about it,” said a sales clerk, who said she often left work with a throbbing head and a throat scratched raw by shouting. “They want it to be like a club in here.”
The Abercrombie spokesman said, “We comply with all applicable laws with respect to maximum sound levels, and we conduct regular readings and assessments to ensure such compliance and that the sound does not have a negative impact on our associates.”
Wyatt Magnum, a music designer, slipped into the Hard Rock Cafe in Times Square on a recent night and trotted down stairs to the restaurants. Tourists were digging into burgers, fajitas and fish and chips. A rock song was playing loudly — but not deafeningly so.
Mr. Magnum homed in on the tempo, and guessed it to be about 125 beats per minute — about the same as the Rolling Stones’ “Start Me Up.”
It is the perfect tempo, Mr. Magnum noted, for turning tables.
Mr. Magnum designs music programs for restaurants, bars and hotels, and often programs them to increase in tempo and volume as the day goes on, and to peak at cocktail hour, when the profit margins are largest. He counts luxury hotels and chain restaurants among his clients, though he did not want their names published, and sells an Encyclopedia of Beats-Per-Minute to help proprietors perfect tempos.
“It gets louder and faster and causes people to eat and leave,” he said.
He learned the art of molding crowd behavior as a D.J., changing songs to rotate people off dance floors and toward the bar. As more club owners enter the restaurant business, he said, they have imported their penchant for loud music — and their savvy about its effects.
“Are we manipulating you? Of course we are,” said Jon Taffer, a restaurant and night life consultant and the host of the reality show “Bar Rescue.”
“My job,” he said, “is to put my hand as deeply in your pocket as I can for as long as you like it. It’s a manipulative business.”
Not everyone buys it. Ken Friedman, majority owner of the Spotted Pig, the Breslin and the John Dory Oyster Bar, all busy Manhattan restaurants, said calculating beats per minute to speed up turnover sounded like “mumbo jumbo.” “I don’t think any great restaurants here do that,” he said.
But Mr. Magnum said the Hard Rock Cafe had the practice down to a science, ever since its founders realized that by playing loud, fast music, patrons talked less, consumed more and left quickly, a technique documented in the International Directory of Company Histories. While not denying this tactic, Hard Rock said its current approach was “vastly different,” with on-site video and guests helping to select the music.
There is research supporting Mr. Magnum’s theory. In 1985, a study by Fairfield University in Connecticut reported that people ate faster when background music was sped up, from 3.83 to 4.4 bites per minute. Nicolas Gueguen, a professor of behavioral sciences at the Université de Bretagne-Sud in France, reported in the October 2008 edition of the journal Alcoholism: Clinical and Experimental Research that higher volumes led beer drinkers in a bar to imbibe more. When the bar’s music was 72 decibels, people ordered an average of 2.6 drinks and took 14.5 minutes to finish one. But when the volume was turned up to 88 decibels, customers ordered an average of 3.4 drinks and took 11.5 minutes to finish each one.
Curt Gathje, a lead editor at Zagat who has noticed New York restaurants’ getting markedly louder in the last decade, said, “There’s a new generation that instead of going to nightclubs they go to restaurants, and nightclubs have sort of bled into restaurants.”
“People don’t want to go to a place that seems dead,” he added. “Younger people feel they want some action.”
Recent changes in restaurant design have also increased sound levels. The trend of making restaurants look like brasseries and bars to resemble speakeasies has bred an abundance of hard surfaces that can reflect and amplify sound: ceramic tiles, concrete floors and tin ceilings. This despite the fact that one of the biggest customer complaints about restaurants, according to Zagat, is noise. Yet those who like noisy places said they were energizing and gave them a sense that they were where it’s at.
Maria Vasquez, 22, a design student who spends time at Lavo — home to the 96 decibel levels and migraine-afflicted waitress — said she found the cacophony there fun. Tiffany Trifilio, 26, a fashion analyst who frequents the Standard Hotel’s Biergarten, said the din made her feel part of the crowd. And Katherine Gold, 35, who often stays at home with her baby, reveled in Lavo’s noise one recent night. “I spend my days in my apartment and at Central Park,” she said. “I have enough quiet.”
Patrons of spin classes also said the din was part of the draw. The pounding music helped them forget they were exercising, they said, and made them feel they were reliving the club days of younger years.
Yet an hour in a noisy spin class followed by a few hours in a very loud bar could easily put people over their recommended daily noise dose. Especially in New York, where people drown out yowling sirens and screeching subways by cranking up MP3 players, ears often do not get the break they need.
Muffling the Din
Representatives and owners of several New York City establishments where sound topped 90 decibels said they had not known that they might have been breaching federal guidelines.
A spokeswoman for the Standard, where the Biergarten’s average decibel levels hovered in the mid-90s, said that the sound level varied by time of day, and that the owners did not know they might be breaking federal laws. “We will look into this independently,” she said in a statement, “and center our efforts on this matter and around our staff’s well-being, which is of utmost importance to us.”
Bill Reed, one of the owners of the Brooklyn Star, said he had no idea that the restaurant’s volume might be nearing risky levels. The restaurant would install insulating foam under the tables, he said, and possibly hang sound absorption boxes, too.
Bill Bonbrest, chief operating officer for the TAO Group, which owns Lavo, said no patron or employee had ever complained about the noise. Mr. Bonbrest said he did not know that Lavo might be violating a noise standard, and a few weeks later, he said the company had hired a professional to measure the sound. A hearing conservation program would be put in place, he said, which would include providing hearing protection and employee audio tests.
And Keith McNally, owner of several brasserielike restaurants including Schiller’s Liquor Bar on the Lower East Side, which registered 91 decibels, said that the D.J. never played for more than four hours a night, and that volume was kept down before 8:30 p.m. and after 3 a.m. He also said employees were allowed to wear earplugs.
After bringing in an engineer to measure sound, the owners of Catch, a restaurant in the meatpacking district, installed 1,800 square feet of sound panels, noticeably muffling the sound. In the fall, the chef and restaurateur Andrew Carmellini installed $10,000 worth of soundproofing at the Dutch in SoHo: his customers’ biggest complaint, he said in a Twitter post, had been noise. And Alex Stupak, the chef and owner of the Empellon taquerias in the East Village and the West Village, spent close to $20,000 soundproofing his restaurants after complaints about the din. “I learned a new word reading the reviews — cacophonous,” he said. “You couldn’t hear someone across the table.”
As for the loud spin classes, Donna Cyrus, senior vice president for programming at Crunch, said that individual instructors set the volume levels, and that each sound system had limits to ensure volumes were safe. Instructors, she added, were not required to wear earplugs.
‘A Lifetime Accumulation’
Up to 30 percent of workers exposed to noise levels of 90 decibels or more over their working lifetimes can expect hearing loss, according to the National Institute for Occupational Safety and Health. Few waiters or gym instructors are likely to stay in their jobs that long. But noise exposure is like sun exposure. Different people have different susceptibilities, and too much of it gradually wears on the body until, for some, irrevocable damage is done.
“It’s a lifetime accumulation that never goes away,” Dr. Hughes of the deafness institute said. “When you have damage, it’s permanent.”
Some workers admitted that they were pained by the volume. Others said they knew they were being subjected to dangerously loud levels but shrugged off the risk.
Reign Hudson, who teaches spin classes where the volume can top 100 decibels, said she was used to the loudness. Even after learning the levels were potentially dangerous to her hearing, she was unfazed. “It really irritates me if the music is too low,” she said. “Usually I’ll tell people if you don’t like loud music, don’t sit near the speaker.”
A bartender who has worked at Lavo for a year and a half said she thought her hearing was suffering a little, but she was staying in the job because the money was good. Jeffrey Sullivan, 34, a bartender at the Standard Hotel’s Biergarten, said he was surprised that the decibel levels there were so high. He has worked, however, in construction, played bass guitar in a band and surfed, all of which can be hard on the ears. He found the Standard, by contrast, soothing. “It’s nothing really piercing in here; it’s all loud voices,” he said. “It’s kind of gentle on the ears.”
Yet Nadene Grey, who used to tend bar at the Standard’s beer garden, said she had frequently been exhausted at the end of her shift. After learning of the noise measurements there, she said: “It really wears on you. I’m sure it’s the physical stress of not just making all those drinks, but the physical stress of the noise.”
Hearing loss from chronic exposure to noise starts with the loss of hearing high-frequency sounds, and the damage can go undetected for years, which is what happened to Ian Carson, a longtime bartender.
One weeknight, Mr. Carson assumed his regular spot behind the bar at Campagnola, an Italian restaurant that is an institution of sorts on the Upper East Side. A waiter came up, inhaled deeply and bellowed, “Bloody mary and a cosmopolitan.” Mr. Carson reflexively cupped his ear. “What?” he asked, tilting his head.
“Bloody mary and a cosmopolitan!” the waiter hollered back.
Mr. Carson, 66, began losing his hearing 20 years ago. Serving in the Army did not help. Neither did his stint working in discos, nor nearly three decades of working at Campagnola, which has a reputation for getting noisy, though on that particular night it was relatively quiet, averaging 82 decibels.
Sometimes Mr. Carson makes the wrong drinks. A lot of the time he just reads lips and guesses.
And when the background noise picks up, he said, “my ears are only good for hanging sunglasses.”
U.S. Standards on Workplace Noise Trail Those of Other Countries
Noise levels recorded at nearly a dozen restaurants, gyms and bars in New York City reached heights that, if sustained over as little as two hours, would violate standards set by the Occupational Safety and Health Administration to protect workers’ hearing. But even if the regulations were heeded, many audiologists say, they would not protect hearing enough: federal noise protection standards lag behind much of the industrialized world’s.
OSHA requires that workers exposed to an average of 90 decibels — about as loud as truck traffic — for eight hours wear hearing protection. Under the agency’s measurements, when the volume increases by five decibels, the noise dose doubles, and so the permissible exposure time is cut in half — if levels reach 95 decibels, the maximum exposure without hearing protection is four hours.
But many other countries, and even some agencies in the United States, adhere to stricter standards. (Britain has a Web site where people can calculate their daily doses of noise.)
Under the stricter guidelines, workers may not be exposed to 85 decibels for more than eight hours a day without hearing protection. Several agencies have also concluded that the risk of hearing loss doubles with every three-decibel increase, not five.
Laura Kauth, an audiologist and president of the National Hearing Conservation Association, said, “The general consensus of professionals in the hearing-health field is that we should limit at 85 decibels” with a 3-decibel standard for when noise dose doubles.
Under those standards, at 99 decibels (the average sound level recorded one recent Saturday night at Beaumarchais, a restaurant in Manhattan) the maximum recommended exposure is 19 minutes.
Yet enforcement of noise regulations at restaurants, gyms and bars in New York City is almost unheard-of. Noise complaints from workers at these places are rarely, if ever, reported to OSHA, it said.
Part of the problem may be a lack of awareness. At the national level, the only federal body tasked specifically with overseeing environmental noise was the Office of Noise Abatement and Control, which lost its financing three decades ago.
Alice Suter, an audiologist who has worked for OSHA and the National Institute for Occupational Safety and Health, said part of the reason federal noise standards lagged behind those of comparable countries was stiff resistance to even the suggestion of tougher standards. “It all has to do with economics and the regulatory process,” Dr. Suter said. “It’s getting harder and harder for OSHA to issue new regulations and revise old ones.”
Not that OSHA has not tried. In 2010, the agency announced plans to dust off a long-ignored requirement that employers soundproof noisy workplaces and not merely provide hearing protection, which was originally intended to be a temporary fix. Too many workers, the agency said, were being harmed by loud noise.
Opposition came swiftly from the National Association of Manufacturers and the United States Chamber of Commerce, which argued that the guidelines would be too costly.
A month after making the proposal, OSHA withdrew it.
It has a nifty picture of droughts over the past several decades
The drought that has settled over more than half of the continental United States this summer is the most widespread in more than half a century. And it is likely to grow worse.
The latest outlook released by the National Weather Service on Thursday forecasts increasingly dry conditions over much of the nation’s breadbasket, a development that could lead to higher food prices and shipping costs as well as reduced revenues in areas that count on summer tourism. About the only relief in sight was tropical activity in the Gulf of Mexico and the Southeast that could bring rain to parts of the South.
The unsettling prospects come at a time of growing uncertainty for the country’s economy. With evidence mounting of a slowdown in the economic recovery, this new blow from the weather is particularly ill-timed.
Already some farmers are watching their cash crops burn to the point of no return. Others have been cutting their corn early to use for feed, a much less profitable venture.
“It really is a crisis. I don’t think we’ve ever seen anything like this in my lifetime,” Gov. Pat Quinn of Illinois said after touring ravaged farms in the southern part of the state.
The government has declared one-third of the nation’s counties — 1,297 of them across 29 states — federal disaster areas as a result of the drought, which will allow farmers to apply for low-interest loans to get them through the disappointing growing season.
“It’s got the potential to be the worst drought we’ve ever had in Arkansas,” said Butch Calhoun, the state’s secretary of agriculture. “It’s going to be very detrimental to our economy.”
What is particularly striking about this dry spell is its breadth. Fifty-five percent of the continental United States — from California to Arkansas, Texas to North Dakota — is under moderate to extreme drought, according to the government, the largest such area since December 1956. An analysis released on Thursday by the United States Drought Monitor showed that 88 percent of corn and 87 percent of soybean crops in the country were in drought-stricken regions, a 10 percent jump from a week before. Corn and soybean prices reached record highs on Thursday, with corn closing just over $8.07 a bushel and soybeans trading as high as $17.49.
As of Sunday, more than half of the corn in seven states was in poor or very poor condition, according to the Department of Agriculture. In Kentucky, Missouri and Indiana, that figure is above 70 percent. Over all, only 31 percent of the nation’s corn is in good to excellent condition, compared with 66 percent at the same time last year.
“We’re expecting significant reductions in production potential yield, potential for corn and soybeans in particular,” said Brad Rippey, a meteorologist with the Department of Agriculture.
The withering corn has increased feed prices and depleted available feeding land, putting stress on cattle farmers. A record 54 percent of pasture and rangeland — where cattle feed or where hay is harvested for feeding — was in poor or very poor condition, according to the Department of Agriculture. Many farmers have been forced to sell their animals.
Because feed can account for nearly half of a cattle farmer’s costs, consumers could see a rise in the price of meat and dairy products, experts said. The high sustained heat has led the key components in milk, like fat and protein, to plummet more than usual, said Chris Galen, a spokesman for National Milk Producers Federation.
“This is due to cows eating less dry matter, and drinking more water ... which tends to thin out the resulting milk output,” he said in an e-mail. “So, if you’re a cheese maker, you need to use a little more milk to get the same volume of cheese output.”
Still, this year’s drought is not expected to be as rough on Midwestern agriculture as the one in 1988. Corn yields were 22 percent under trend that year, and this year the Department of Agriculture is projecting yields 11 percent under trend — “though that could change in August,” said Joseph W. Glauber, the department’s chief economist.
Many also believe that farmers are better situated this year to handle the impact of a drought than they were two decades ago. More than 80 percent of corn and soybeans are estimated to be insured, Mr. Glauber said.
Last year, crop insurers paid a record $11 billion in indemnity payments, and that “should serve as a good model for what farmers can expect this year,” Tom Zacharias, the president of National Crop Insurance Services, said in a news release.
But the impact of this drought has extended beyond farming. In Missouri, the torrid conditions have sparked forest fires that resemble the types of wildfires seen in the West. Already, 117 wildfires have burned in Missouri’s Mark Twain National Forest, a record-setting pace. Conditions have been so dry that there was a report of hay in a barn combusting on its own.
Meanwhile, water levels are falling in town reservoirs as well as major waterways like the Mississippi and Ohio Rivers. Barge and towboat operators have been reducing the size of their loads because of the low water, said Ann M. McCulloch, a spokeswoman for the American Waterways Operators. This means shipping operators, who transport a variety of goods from crops to gravel, have had to take more trips, increasing transportation costs that could be passed on to consumers.
Officials in Augusta, Kan., estimate that they have 110 days worth of water that they can draw from a nearby reservoir. The primary reservoir used for their municipal water supply dropped too low last year, the result of a drought in the area that started two years ago, said Josh Shaw, the assistant to the city manager. Indianapolis has put restrictions on water use; south of the city, Johnson County banned smoking at the county fair.
In Colorado, there is concern that the drought could damage forage that deer, elk and other game feed on in the fall. But the state also has seen advantages from the drought. Lower water levels have been helpful for fly fishing, and, with fewer places for animals to drink water, they will likely gather in concentrated areas, making conditions better for hunting.
And one Indianapolis painter is making the best of the situation, according to The Indianapolis Star, by starting a new arm of his business: painting brown lawns green.
Cameras Are Cyclists’ ‘Black Boxes’ in Accidents
When Evan Wilder went flying onto the pavement during his bicycle commute one morning here, he didn’t have time to notice the license plate of the pickup truck that had sideswiped him after its driver hurled a curse at him. Nor did a witness driving another car.
But the video camera Mr. Wilder had strapped to his head caught the whole episode. After watching a recording of the incident later, Mr. Wilder gave the license plate number to the police and a suspect was eventually charged with leaving the scene of an accident.
“Without the video, we wouldn’t know who did it,” said Mr. Wilder, 33, who was bruised and scraped in the crash.
Cyclists have long had a rocky coexistence with motorists and pedestrians, who often criticize bike riders for a confrontational attitude, and for blowing through stop signs or otherwise exempting themselves from the rules of the road. Now small cameras — the cycling equivalent of the black box on an airplane — are becoming an intermediary in the relationship, providing high-tech evidence in what is sometimes an ugly contest between people who ride the roads on two wheels and those who use four.
Video from these cameras has begun to play an invaluable role in police investigations of a small number of hit-and-runs and other incidents around the country, local authorities say. Lawyers who specialize in representing bicyclists say they expect the use of cameras for this purpose to increase as awareness of the devices goes up and their prices, now starting at around $200, come down.
Some riders even argue that the technology will encourage cyclists to keep themselves in check during dust-ups with drivers.
“I know my actions before and after some event are going to be recorded if I’m the one being a jerk,” Mr. Wilder said. “It makes me want to be careful.”
Bicyclists say cameras can also deter motorist harassment, a problem that many complain about and that cities like Los Angeles and Berkeley, Calif., have sought to combat with new laws.
“It’s a fact of life that on American roads that you get punked, cut off purposely, harassed, not once but on a regular basis,” said Bob Mionske, a former Olympic cyclist who is now a lawyer representing bicyclists in Portland, Ore. “If motorists start to hear about bikes having cameras, they’re going to think twice about running you off the road.”
Gary Souza, a cyclist in Sacramento, said something like that happened to him. He wears a camera on his helmet during his 50-minute commute each way between his home and office. He began riding with the device this year after buying a $7,000 velomobile, a three-wheeled recumbent cycle with a shell around it.
“Even though it’s insured, if anything happens I figured I wanted to get it on camera,” said Mr. Souza, who works in information technology for the state of California.
A couple of months ago, Mr. Souza said, a motorist became upset after the cyclist crossed in front of his vehicle to make a turn. The driver got out of his car to confront Mr. Souza, who pointed to the camera on his head.
“I said, ‘Don’t be stupid,’ ” Mr. Souza said. “He quickly ran back to his car. I’m certain I avoided a couple blows.”
The new cameras, which have started to catch on in the last few years, are meant for shooting video and photos while skiing, surfing and doing other sports. Likewise, many cyclists use them to memorialize their rides.
GoPro and Contour make popular models; GoPro says sales through bike retailers have nearly doubled so far this year from the same period last year.
One of the most prominent bicycle crash videos so far was recorded in April by two Brazilian riders who were climbing the hills of Berkeley when a black car knocked them down and sped off. Neither bicyclist was seriously injured, according to the Berkeley police. The video of the crash has been viewed more than 362,000 times on YouTube.
The Berkeley police identified the car’s license plate and later found the man the vehicle was registered to. They believe he falsely reported his car stolen to cover up for the driver of the car and are still investigating the incident, said Capt. Andrew Greenwood, a spokesman for the police.
On a recent Friday evening, as the streets of downtown Washington were jammed with cars heading home, Mr. Wilder pedaled away wearing a camera on his forehead, looking like a spelunker wearing a headlamp. He scooted between parked cars and traffic on the road, sometimes with less than a foot of space between him and moving vehicles.
The video Mr. Wilder shot of his crash in Washington, which occurred last August, at first did not seem as if it would help much in tracking down the motorist who had struck him. But Mr. Wilder, who works in the photography department of National Geographic, examined the video frame by frame until he discovered a clear picture of the vehicle’s license plate, captured while he was lying on the ground.
The District of Columbia’s office of the attorney general charged the motorist, John W. Diehl, with leaving the scene of an accident. Federal prosecutors, who handle felony cases in the district, are also looking into the case.
Mr. Diehl’s lawyer, Adam R. Hunter, declined to comment. Mr. Diehl has pleaded not guilty, said a spokesman for the attorney general.
Mr. Wilder said, “Most cyclists don’t use cameras so Mr. Diehl may have assumed he could assault and drive away anonymously.”
Working or Playing Indoors, New Yorkers Face an Unabated Roar
The waitress’s lips were moving but nothing seemed to be coming out. Hundreds of voices swallowed her words as a D.J. pumped out a ticka ticka of dance beats. The happy hour-fueled din rose with it, amplified by tin ceilings and tiled walls.
“I’ve been getting migraines,” the waitress shouted on a recent Thursday night, leaning in to be heard. She said that she woke up with her ears buzzing, and that her doctor had recently prescribed seizure medicine: “It decreases the amount of headaches you get.”
The restaurant, Lavo in Midtown Manhattan, is not just loud but often dangerously so. On that night, the noise averaged 96 decibels over the course of an hour, as loud as a power mower, and a level to which, by government standards, workers should not be exposed for more than three and a half hours without protection for their hearing.
Lavo is far from alone. Across New York City, in restaurants and bars, but also in stores and gyms, loud noise has become a fact of life in the very places where people have traditionally sought respite from urban stress. The New York Times measured noise levels at 37 restaurants, bars, stores and gyms across the city and found levels that experts said bordered on dangerous at one-third of them.
At the Brooklyn Star in Williamsburg, the volume averaged 94 decibels over an hour and a half — as loud as an electric drill. At the Standard Hotel’s Biergarten in the meatpacking district, where workers can log 10-hour shifts, the noise level averaged 96 decibels. No music was playing: the noise was generated by hundreds of voices bouncing off the metal skeleton of the High Line.
At Beaumarchais, a nightclub-like brasserie on West 13th Street, the music averaged 99 decibels over 20 minutes and reached 102 in its loudest 5 minutes. “It definitely takes a toll,” a waiter said.
Workers at these places said the sound levels, which were recorded over periods as long as an hour and a half, were typical when they were working.
One spin class at a Crunch gym on the Upper West Side averaged 100 decibels over 40 minutes and hit 105 in its loudest 5. At a Crunch gym in Park Slope, Brooklyn, the noise level averaged 91 decibels. At the Fifth Avenue flagship store of Abercrombie & Fitch, which has designed many of its stores to resemble nightclubs, pulsating music hit 88 decibels, just shy of the limit at which workers are required to wear protection if exposed to that volume for eight hours.
By way of comparison, a C train hurtling downtown in Manhattan registered at 84 decibels; normal conversation is from 60 to 65 decibels.
Some research has shown that people drink more when music is loud; one study found that people chewed faster when tempos were sped up. Armed with this knowledge, some bars, retailers and restaurants are finely tuning sound systems, according to audio engineers and restaurant consultants.
“Think about places where they’re trying to get you in and out as quickly as possible,” said John Mayberry, an acoustical engineer in San Marino, Calif., who has railed against what he terms the “weaponization” of audio. “It’s real obvious what their intentions are.”
Some customers like the loudness. Younger people can withstand loud music longer, while older ones may run from it, helping proprietors maintain a youthful clientele and a fresh image.
But repeated exposure to loud noise often damages hearing and has been linked to higher levels of stress, hypertension and heart disease. Some restaurateurs said they were surprised that their decibel levels were too high, and a few said they were taking remedial measures.
Indeed, employees at noisy places are often the most affected, yet enforcement of existing noise regulations is almost nonexistent at places like these.
The Occupational Safety and Health Administration, which is responsible for workplace noise, generally investigates only when complaints are made; this appears to happen rarely, if ever, when it comes to restaurants, bars and gyms (the agency said it would take 138 years to inspect every workplace in the United States). In the 2011 fiscal year, all of the 14 noise violations issued by OSHA in New York City went to construction sites or factories; none went to restaurants, clubs or bars. The city has a noise code, but in the cases of restaurants and bars, it applies only to music and thumping that annoy the neighbors.
OSHA requires workers to wear hearing protection if they are exposed to 90-decibel noise for eight hours; at 85 decibels, employers must provide ear protection and conduct hearing tests.
Many hearing loss prevention experts say, however, that people should not be exposed to 100 decibels — the level at the spin class on the Upper West Side — for more than 15 minutes without hearing protection.
“We definitely consider those levels able to cause damage and likely to cause permanent damage with repeated exposure,” said Laura Kauth, an audiologist and president of the National Hearing Conservation Association. “They’re experiencing industrial level noise.”
But at all the aforementioned places, there was nary an earplug in sight.
Hearing experts say ears never get used to loud noise. “Your ears don’t get more tolerant,” said Dr. Gordon Hughes, director for clinical trials at the National Institute on Deafness and Other Communication Disorders. “Your psyche gets more tolerant.”
The background noise is too loud, Dr. Hughes said, if a person’s voice has to be raised to be heard by someone three feet away. Signs of too much exposure include not hearing well after the noise stops, a ringing sound and feeling as if the ears are under pressure or blocked. None of these symptoms necessarily mean the damage is permanent, though even if hearing seems restored to normal, damage may have been done. Yet hearing loss from noise typically takes months or even years to develop.
One waiter at Lavo, who, like several other workers, did not want his name published for fear of losing his job, said he knew his hearing could be in jeopardy. But, he reasoned, slight hearing loss was inevitable, since he had also played in a band. “When it happens, it happens,” he shrugged. “Hopefully by that time they’ll have better fixes for it.”
Rick Neitzel, an assistant professor at the University of Michigan Risk Science Center, said full-time employees subjected to the volumes found at Lavo and Beaumarchais for a year or two could easily incur hearing loss. “Restaurants in the high 90s,” Dr. Neitzel said, “something really should be done.”
Tailoring the Clientele
At the Abercrombie flagship on a recent afternoon, a preteen girl plunged wide-eyed into the darkness as loud beats poured from dozens of speakers. Her mother and her grandmother trailed her. The grandmother, Nancy Hilem, 56, of Bucks County, Pa., said they had been in the shop 10 minutes but it felt as if it had been an hour because of the noise. Normally calm — she works at a funeral parlor — Ms. Hilem found herself jumpy.
“I can’t concentrate,” she said. “I can’t focus on what I want to buy because of the noise. I want to say to her, ‘Just find something, I’ll buy anything, let’s just get out!’ ”
According to Mr. Mayberry, that is exactly what Abercrombie wants: for loud music to keep out older people while teenagers venture in with their parents’ credit cards. “You can control your audience,” he said. “If you want young people in there, give them a specific type of sound.”
Abercrombie is but one example. Hollister, another Abercrombie brand, and H&M also go after the young: in their SoHo stores, volume levels stretched into the high 80s and often the low 90s.
Brian McKinley, vice president for marketing at DMX, the sensory branding company that creates Abercrombie’s playlists, said the goal was to create an “aspirational” environment. Throbbing music and dim lights make youngsters feel as if they are in a club and entice them to stay longer.
“There’s a lot of studies out there showing that the more time spent in the store correlates to more items purchased,” Mr. McKinley said. An Abercrombie spokesman said in a statement that the company’s “unique A&F in-store experience is something that our customer wants.”
Several Abercrombie employees admitted to frequent headaches. One said she hid out in the stock room to get away from the noise.
“We can’t do anything about it,” said a sales clerk, who said she often left work with a throbbing head and a throat scratched raw by shouting. “They want it to be like a club in here.”
The Abercrombie spokesman said, “We comply with all applicable laws with respect to maximum sound levels, and we conduct regular readings and assessments to ensure such compliance and that the sound does not have a negative impact on our associates.”
Wyatt Magnum, a music designer, slipped into the Hard Rock Cafe in Times Square on a recent night and trotted down stairs to the restaurants. Tourists were digging into burgers, fajitas and fish and chips. A rock song was playing loudly — but not deafeningly so.
Mr. Magnum homed in on the tempo, and guessed it to be about 125 beats per minute — about the same as the Rolling Stones’ “Start Me Up.”
It is the perfect tempo, Mr. Magnum noted, for turning tables.
Mr. Magnum designs music programs for restaurants, bars and hotels, and often programs them to increase in tempo and volume as the day goes on, and to peak at cocktail hour, when the profit margins are largest. He counts luxury hotels and chain restaurants among his clients, though he did not want their names published, and sells an Encyclopedia of Beats-Per-Minute to help proprietors perfect tempos.
“It gets louder and faster and causes people to eat and leave,” he said.
He learned the art of molding crowd behavior as a D.J., changing songs to rotate people off dance floors and toward the bar. As more club owners enter the restaurant business, he said, they have imported their penchant for loud music — and their savvy about its effects.
“Are we manipulating you? Of course we are,” said Jon Taffer, a restaurant and night life consultant and the host of the reality show “Bar Rescue.”
“My job,” he said, “is to put my hand as deeply in your pocket as I can for as long as you like it. It’s a manipulative business.”
Not everyone buys it. Ken Friedman, majority owner of the Spotted Pig, the Breslin and the John Dory Oyster Bar, all busy Manhattan restaurants, said calculating beats per minute to speed up turnover sounded like “mumbo jumbo.” “I don’t think any great restaurants here do that,” he said.
But Mr. Magnum said the Hard Rock Cafe had the practice down to a science, ever since its founders realized that by playing loud, fast music, patrons talked less, consumed more and left quickly, a technique documented in the International Directory of Company Histories. While not denying this tactic, Hard Rock said its current approach was “vastly different,” with on-site video and guests helping to select the music.
There is research supporting Mr. Magnum’s theory. In 1985, a study by Fairfield University in Connecticut reported that people ate faster when background music was sped up, from 3.83 to 4.4 bites per minute. Nicolas Gueguen, a professor of behavioral sciences at the Université de Bretagne-Sud in France, reported in the October 2008 edition of the journal Alcoholism: Clinical and Experimental Research that higher volumes led beer drinkers in a bar to imbibe more. When the bar’s music was 72 decibels, people ordered an average of 2.6 drinks and took 14.5 minutes to finish one. But when the volume was turned up to 88 decibels, customers ordered an average of 3.4 drinks and took 11.5 minutes to finish each one.
Curt Gathje, a lead editor at Zagat who has noticed New York restaurants’ getting markedly louder in the last decade, said, “There’s a new generation that instead of going to nightclubs they go to restaurants, and nightclubs have sort of bled into restaurants.”
“People don’t want to go to a place that seems dead,” he added. “Younger people feel they want some action.”
Recent changes in restaurant design have also increased sound levels. The trend of making restaurants look like brasseries and bars to resemble speakeasies has bred an abundance of hard surfaces that can reflect and amplify sound: ceramic tiles, concrete floors and tin ceilings. This despite the fact that one of the biggest customer complaints about restaurants, according to Zagat, is noise. Yet those who like noisy places said they were energizing and gave them a sense that they were where it’s at.
Maria Vasquez, 22, a design student who spends time at Lavo — home to the 96 decibel levels and migraine-afflicted waitress — said she found the cacophony there fun. Tiffany Trifilio, 26, a fashion analyst who frequents the Standard Hotel’s Biergarten, said the din made her feel part of the crowd. And Katherine Gold, 35, who often stays at home with her baby, reveled in Lavo’s noise one recent night. “I spend my days in my apartment and at Central Park,” she said. “I have enough quiet.”
Patrons of spin classes also said the din was part of the draw. The pounding music helped them forget they were exercising, they said, and made them feel they were reliving the club days of younger years.
Yet an hour in a noisy spin class followed by a few hours in a very loud bar could easily put people over their recommended daily noise dose. Especially in New York, where people drown out yowling sirens and screeching subways by cranking up MP3 players, ears often do not get the break they need.
Muffling the Din
Representatives and owners of several New York City establishments where sound topped 90 decibels said they had not known that they might have been breaching federal guidelines.
A spokeswoman for the Standard, where the Biergarten’s average decibel levels hovered in the mid-90s, said that the sound level varied by time of day, and that the owners did not know they might be breaking federal laws. “We will look into this independently,” she said in a statement, “and center our efforts on this matter and around our staff’s well-being, which is of utmost importance to us.”
Bill Reed, one of the owners of the Brooklyn Star, said he had no idea that the restaurant’s volume might be nearing risky levels. The restaurant would install insulating foam under the tables, he said, and possibly hang sound absorption boxes, too.
Bill Bonbrest, chief operating officer for the TAO Group, which owns Lavo, said no patron or employee had ever complained about the noise. Mr. Bonbrest said he did not know that Lavo might be violating a noise standard, and a few weeks later, he said the company had hired a professional to measure the sound. A hearing conservation program would be put in place, he said, which would include providing hearing protection and employee audio tests.
And Keith McNally, owner of several brasserielike restaurants including Schiller’s Liquor Bar on the Lower East Side, which registered 91 decibels, said that the D.J. never played for more than four hours a night, and that volume was kept down before 8:30 p.m. and after 3 a.m. He also said employees were allowed to wear earplugs.
After bringing in an engineer to measure sound, the owners of Catch, a restaurant in the meatpacking district, installed 1,800 square feet of sound panels, noticeably muffling the sound. In the fall, the chef and restaurateur Andrew Carmellini installed $10,000 worth of soundproofing at the Dutch in SoHo: his customers’ biggest complaint, he said in a Twitter post, had been noise. And Alex Stupak, the chef and owner of the Empellon taquerias in the East Village and the West Village, spent close to $20,000 soundproofing his restaurants after complaints about the din. “I learned a new word reading the reviews — cacophonous,” he said. “You couldn’t hear someone across the table.”
As for the loud spin classes, Donna Cyrus, senior vice president for programming at Crunch, said that individual instructors set the volume levels, and that each sound system had limits to ensure volumes were safe. Instructors, she added, were not required to wear earplugs.
‘A Lifetime Accumulation’
Up to 30 percent of workers exposed to noise levels of 90 decibels or more over their working lifetimes can expect hearing loss, according to the National Institute for Occupational Safety and Health. Few waiters or gym instructors are likely to stay in their jobs that long. But noise exposure is like sun exposure. Different people have different susceptibilities, and too much of it gradually wears on the body until, for some, irrevocable damage is done.
“It’s a lifetime accumulation that never goes away,” Dr. Hughes of the deafness institute said. “When you have damage, it’s permanent.”
Some workers admitted that they were pained by the volume. Others said they knew they were being subjected to dangerously loud levels but shrugged off the risk.
Reign Hudson, who teaches spin classes where the volume can top 100 decibels, said she was used to the loudness. Even after learning the levels were potentially dangerous to her hearing, she was unfazed. “It really irritates me if the music is too low,” she said. “Usually I’ll tell people if you don’t like loud music, don’t sit near the speaker.”
A bartender who has worked at Lavo for a year and a half said she thought her hearing was suffering a little, but she was staying in the job because the money was good. Jeffrey Sullivan, 34, a bartender at the Standard Hotel’s Biergarten, said he was surprised that the decibel levels there were so high. He has worked, however, in construction, played bass guitar in a band and surfed, all of which can be hard on the ears. He found the Standard, by contrast, soothing. “It’s nothing really piercing in here; it’s all loud voices,” he said. “It’s kind of gentle on the ears.”
Yet Nadene Grey, who used to tend bar at the Standard’s beer garden, said she had frequently been exhausted at the end of her shift. After learning of the noise measurements there, she said: “It really wears on you. I’m sure it’s the physical stress of not just making all those drinks, but the physical stress of the noise.”
Hearing loss from chronic exposure to noise starts with the loss of hearing high-frequency sounds, and the damage can go undetected for years, which is what happened to Ian Carson, a longtime bartender.
One weeknight, Mr. Carson assumed his regular spot behind the bar at Campagnola, an Italian restaurant that is an institution of sorts on the Upper East Side. A waiter came up, inhaled deeply and bellowed, “Bloody mary and a cosmopolitan.” Mr. Carson reflexively cupped his ear. “What?” he asked, tilting his head.
“Bloody mary and a cosmopolitan!” the waiter hollered back.
Mr. Carson, 66, began losing his hearing 20 years ago. Serving in the Army did not help. Neither did his stint working in discos, nor nearly three decades of working at Campagnola, which has a reputation for getting noisy, though on that particular night it was relatively quiet, averaging 82 decibels.
Sometimes Mr. Carson makes the wrong drinks. A lot of the time he just reads lips and guesses.
And when the background noise picks up, he said, “my ears are only good for hanging sunglasses.”
U.S. Standards on Workplace Noise Trail Those of Other Countries
Noise levels recorded at nearly a dozen restaurants, gyms and bars in New York City reached heights that, if sustained over as little as two hours, would violate standards set by the Occupational Safety and Health Administration to protect workers’ hearing. But even if the regulations were heeded, many audiologists say, they would not protect hearing enough: federal noise protection standards lag behind much of the industrialized world’s.
OSHA requires that workers exposed to an average of 90 decibels — about as loud as truck traffic — for eight hours wear hearing protection. Under the agency’s measurements, when the volume increases by five decibels, the noise dose doubles, and so the permissible exposure time is cut in half — if levels reach 95 decibels, the maximum exposure without hearing protection is four hours.
But many other countries, and even some agencies in the United States, adhere to stricter standards. (Britain has a Web site where people can calculate their daily doses of noise.)
Under the stricter guidelines, workers may not be exposed to 85 decibels for more than eight hours a day without hearing protection. Several agencies have also concluded that the risk of hearing loss doubles with every three-decibel increase, not five.
Laura Kauth, an audiologist and president of the National Hearing Conservation Association, said, “The general consensus of professionals in the hearing-health field is that we should limit at 85 decibels” with a 3-decibel standard for when noise dose doubles.
Under those standards, at 99 decibels (the average sound level recorded one recent Saturday night at Beaumarchais, a restaurant in Manhattan) the maximum recommended exposure is 19 minutes.
Yet enforcement of noise regulations at restaurants, gyms and bars in New York City is almost unheard-of. Noise complaints from workers at these places are rarely, if ever, reported to OSHA, it said.
Part of the problem may be a lack of awareness. At the national level, the only federal body tasked specifically with overseeing environmental noise was the Office of Noise Abatement and Control, which lost its financing three decades ago.
Alice Suter, an audiologist who has worked for OSHA and the National Institute for Occupational Safety and Health, said part of the reason federal noise standards lagged behind those of comparable countries was stiff resistance to even the suggestion of tougher standards. “It all has to do with economics and the regulatory process,” Dr. Suter said. “It’s getting harder and harder for OSHA to issue new regulations and revise old ones.”
Not that OSHA has not tried. In 2010, the agency announced plans to dust off a long-ignored requirement that employers soundproof noisy workplaces and not merely provide hearing protection, which was originally intended to be a temporary fix. Too many workers, the agency said, were being harmed by loud noise.
Opposition came swiftly from the National Association of Manufacturers and the United States Chamber of Commerce, which argued that the guidelines would be too costly.
A month after making the proposal, OSHA withdrew it.
