Dear Editor,
Writing to the letters column of your newspaper is my last resort after one year of complaints to the Environmental Protection Agency, Guyana Human Rights Association and the relevant government ministries. I live next to a wood-processing plant on the eastern bank of the Demerara River. The noise and dust coming from this facility are unbearable, and to date the Guyana EPA has been unable to bring an end to the problem of noise nuisance. The EPA has visited the location on several occasions, but was only able to record the violation the very first time they visited. Mysteriously, on every other occasion, the noise would be lowered about 20 to 30 minutes before the EPA people showed up. The EPA people would make their notes, record whatever noise there was, and then they would leave. On a couple of visits, they stayed at the location for several hours, but were still unable to capture the high level of noise I am exposed to on a regular basis. On one of these occasions the owner of the plant switched the machines off, and when the EPA people went over to investigate the prolonged silence, the owner said that the machine had broken down. On another occasion the owner claimed that he did not have any high density wood, such as greenheart or purpleheart. He fed softer wood into his moulder, but that did not produce a very high level of noise. It has reached a point where I am beginning to sound like the shepherd who cried wolf, when in fact there was no wolf. The EPA has given me every assurance that there is no way the owner of the wood processing plant could figure out when they would visit, and my story of the noise going down or being turned off about 20-30 minutes before they arrive did not seem to have any merit.
I also do not understand the system that the EPA uses to determine what is loud and what is not. I purchased a small sound recording device and when my device reads, let us say, sound at 75 dba, the recorder that EPA uses would show a level of approximately 69 dba. Their explanation is that their machines have a one-second delay and mine records noise in real time. In other words, if wood drops to the ground, my reading would shoot up. Editor, my eardrum does not have any mechanism to delay the flow of soundwaves to it, or to average the sound and send an average and not the actual loud noise. It seems as if the EPA is simply bending the rules to allow the violation of one of my fundamental human rights – the right to live in peace. I placed my recording device at a particular location and managed to get readings that are very high when the EPA officers are not around. I placed the same device at the same location when the EPA officers are at the location and I got very low readings, but I was still unable to convince them that the noise I am exposed to when they are not around is much higher.
The staff at the EPA are always unavailable due to the frequent seminars and training they attend, and according to a reliable source, the agency has very limited powers. It is expected that the new government would soon enact appropriate legislation that would give the EPA more authority in the execution of their duties.
Yours faithfully,
(Name and address provided)
