Airport makes progress on sound mitigation

This story by Liberty Darr was first published in the Other Paper on Sept. 5.

A home improvement and insulation program aimed at reducing interior noise levels for homeowners living near the Patrick Leahy Burlington International Airport is beginning to make some headway.

The residential sound insulation program, which the airport launched officially in 2022, has completed work on roughly 15 homes, and with phase four beginning at the end of September, officials are preparing 65 more homes for soundproofing and completing designs for an additional 30 homes next year.

“There are all sorts of different angles we’re trying to actively promote, and at the same time, aggressively try to get additional funding and to help with some of these eligible properties,” aviation director Nic Longo said. “I still would like to push to start a couple of houses this year, but most likely we’re going to be doing that in the spring.”

The blueprint for the project, the airport’s noise exposure map, has approximately 2,500 housing units, based on decibel noise, as being within the program’s reach. Most homes are in South Burlington and Winooski, with others scattered in Colchester and Williston. The project limits houses based on when they were built. For example, homes built after October 1998 are not eligible.

The map, which was last updated in 2019, is also set for an update this year and is expected to be released at the end of October. The airport has been completing noise exposure maps every five years since the early 1980s, said Longo, as new aircraft and different types of aircraft are introduced to the airport.

Take, for example, the Vermont Air National Guard’s F-35 fighter jets that were brought to the airport in 2019, which have been a massive point of contention for those in their flight path.

While the existing map, which uses data from 2018, did not include the fighter jets, the airport’s 2023 forecast map included F-35 noise along with several other aircraft.

The process is highly technical, he said, and includes real radar data, altitude information and extensive data from each individual aircraft carrier.

“All this data is collected into a computer model. The output, of course, is the map,” Longo said.

The new map, including a forecast for 2029, is expected to be ready in the next couple of weeks. After its release, there will be a 30-day public comment period.

Longo doesn’t anticipate the changes to the map to be too drastic. But homes that have been straddling eligibility may now be included or excluded based on new projections.

Most important, he said, is that the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) allows homes that are currently signed up to be completed even if the map changes.

“I think it’s generally going to look very, very similar to what the public sees today,” he said. “That is my understanding of the data collected over the last year.”

About 90 percent of the sound insulation program is funded by the FAA. Remaining funding, Longo said, comes from partnerships with organizations and businesses like Vermont Gas, Efficiency Vermont and Green Mountain Power.

The cost to retrofit each house, roughly $90,000, has dropped from the first two phases, when the cost totaled $110,000 per house. The drop is due, partly, to the greater number of houses being put out to bid at the same time and the costs drop as the physical location of the properties moves farther away from the airport. Those homes require less sound mitigation.

But that per home cost is still much higher than what airport officials originally anticipated.

“When we’re going through very early analysis, pre-pandemic and early onset pandemic, we were hoping around $50,000,” he said.

Last fall, work on some homes stalled when the manufacturer hired to install new windows went out of business.

“So as soon as that occurred, it really put a damper on what our plans were for this year,” he said. “A positive part about this is we were able to figure this out over the last six or so months and get a new manufacturer in place.”

Each home typically requires new windows, added layers of drywall and attic insulation and, in some cases, new interior walls. Longo stressed that each home is unique and requires a large amount of collaboration with each homeowner. One home typically takes around 10 days to complete.

“It’s really fast,” he said. “Sometimes there’ll be four, five, six houses being done at once, but with different contract teams. It generally is a very, very fast process, but the longer part of it is the wait.”

New funding

To bolster the noise mitigation program, Longo said the airport is seeking a $17 million grant opportunity with the U.S. Department of Defense aimed at supporting airports with both active duty and Air National guard bases.

The Burlington International Airport, Longo said, is ahead of the curve in several ways when it comes to requirements for the grant. For one, he said, the airport was the first in the nation to house the F-35s and the jet’s noise projections are included in the noise exposure map. Second, he said, the airport has over 30 years of documentation on noise programs and mitigation.

“I’ve been at the airport 12 years. There’s not been one year in that time that we haven’t applied for a noise project, and that goes back again decades,” he said. “While all these other National Guard units are getting the F-35s, generally, their documents are not up to date, so they have to complete those documents and go through noise exposure maps and even write insulation program protocols before they can really go after additional funding.”

With potential new funding on the horizon, Longo said the airport is launching a campaign in September to encourage people to sign up for noise mitigation, ask questions and seek more information.

“My goal is to make sure that everybody, every single person within today’s contour line and even the future contour line, knows that they may be in or near the noise exposure maps eligible or potentially eligible area,” he said.

Read the story on VTDigger here: Airport makes progress on sound mitigation .