Chris Arns moved to Des Plaines from Pittsburgh eight months ago, his fourth job transfer in six years. And now he`s moving again.
”I can`t stand it, and if I hear one more time, `I`ll get used to it,`
I`m going to get sick,” Arns said.
”It” is noise from O`Hare International Airport, and Arns was among a group of residents living around the airport who have expressed their anger during two days of Federal Aviation Administration hearings on a noise abatement law that will be administered by the FAA.
”How does it affect us?” he replied to a reporter`s question Monday night.”How about our two-year-old jumping out of bed and jumping in with us? ”We`ve got a deck. Do we use it? Forget it.”
Arns was among as many as 300 O`Hare area residents who were at the hearings at the O`Hare Expo Center in Rosemont.
The hearings, which wound up Tuesday, were similar to ones held earlier in Washington, D.C., and now move on to Seattle.
The FAA is proposing a federal airport noise policy that would force airlines to retire older and noiser aircraft by the year 2000 and replace them with jets that are 50 percent quieter.
But at the same time, the FAA wants to take away local authority to impose any other noise control laws. For example, Chicago could not ask airlines to limit nighttime operations at O`Hare.
And that`s a ”sellout” to the airlines, according to the O`Hare Citizens Coalition, a grassroots lobby that delivered 92,000 votes in 26 communities-a two-thirds majority-on an advisory referendum to ban new runways at O`Hare last fall.
Coalition leaders have said they suspect that if the proposed federal noise rules go into effect and a runway is added at O`Hare to relieve congestion, local communities will have no power to prevent a major expansion of the airport`s operations.
U.S. Secretary of Transportation Samuel Skinner supports a new runway at O`Hare but has promised there will be no increase in the 800,000 or so takeoffs and landings there each year.
Anti-noise activists, however, point out that no guarantees have been offered.
Representatives from the airlines as well as Chicago testified in favor of the noise rules. Both said the proposed rules will address the expensive problem of having to deal with ”a patchwork quilt,” as United Airlines vice president J. Richard Street put it, of noise regulations that differ from city to city.
But Matthew Rosenberg, chief organizer for the citizens coalition, said he wasn`t swayed.
”It stinks,” Rosenberg said after delivering a stinging critique of the FAA and the airline industry in testimony before the panel.
”We`re not against growth, we`re not against progress, we simply want to have it handled the right way,” Rosenberg said.
He and other critics deny that O`Hare residents would like to see the airport shut down.
”We`d be crazy to want that,” agreed Carla Lyons, who said her house in Benesenville might be threatened by the addition of a runway at O`Hare.
”But I would like to see the airport live with what it has.”
Arns, meanwhile, was asking about where he could go to join the O`Hare coalition.
”I heard about this on National Public Radio this morning,” Arns said. ”I came here uneducated. But now I know something has to be done. Why aren`t there 2,000 people here?”
