Guyana is a land of many problems and one of the biggest ones is that of noise pollution. The issue is particularly bad in urban areas such as Georgetown.
Noise pollution, or sound pollution, is sound with a wide range of negative impacts on the activities of human and animal life, most of which are harmful to some degree, particularly to health.
In Guyana, the source of such pollution are most commonly machinery, construction activities, loud horns or engine sounds, and loud music from bars and similar establishments, as well as from vehicles.
Guyana’s laws define noise as “unwanted sound which may cause or tend to cause an adverse psychological effect on human beings and includes vibration”. The same legislation goes on to define noise nuisance, pollution, or disturbance as “any unwanted sound including vibration that annoys, disturbs, perturbs normal persons with reasonable sensitivities, or any unwanted sound which reasonably may be perceived to injure or endanger the comfort, repose, health, peace or safety of any humans or animals.
The intensity of sound is measured in decibels. The World Health Organisation (WHO) defines noise as any sound exceeding 55 decibels. Guyana’s laws, though, are a bit more forgiving. In Guyana, sound is defined as noise if it exceeds 75 decibels during the daytime, and 70 decibels at night.
Noise is known to be extremely harmful. Noise pollution is known to cause health problems for people and wildlife. Regardless of the source, inescapable sounds can cause hearing loss, stress, and high blood pressure in humans and other animals including pets. In fact, noise has been linked to an increased risk of early death, according to research conducted by scientists.
Dr David Rojas, an environmental health researcher attached to the Barcelona Institute for Global Health in Spain has studied the subject extensively; he is an internationally recognised expert on the topic.
Dr. Rojas, at a presentation in Belgium, said that, “Noise produces a stimulus to the central nervous system (brain) and this stimulus releases some hormones,’ This increases the risk of hypertension, and hypertension has been related with many other cardiovascular [and] cerebrovascular diseases like infarction (heart attacks) and strokes.”
The expert said, “When we have a background noise, the brain has the capacity to adapt to this noise, and you don’t see it as an annoyance so much and you start to accept and adapt. But even if you are not conscious of the noise, this [noise] is still stimulating your organic system.”
Evidently, noise is a major health issue.
In Guyana, there is no shortage of laws that are intended to mitigate the problem. The 1976 Environmental Protection Act and its further regulations of 2000 as well as the Summary Jurisdiction Offences Act make noise pollution a criminal offence. Unfortunately, the police, however, never comprehensively enforce the relevant laws, and this gives the impression that the laws have fallen into disuse, and noise makers feel that they could continue in their ways unhampered by law enforcers. In Guyana, this is the fundamental cause why the noise nuisance persists.
In Guyana, music systems are, by law, prohibited in mini buses, does the Guyana Police Force (GPF) enforce it? Absolutely not.
Squibs and such noisemakers are illegal, yet the GPF does nothing about it. Noise making businesses are allowed to operate in residential areas, and the list of lawlessness is nearly endless.
Of course, the People’s Progressive Party (PPP) administration is well aware of the problem. In June of last year, the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) presented the GPF with 25 sound level meters which were intended to aid in the Force’s efforts to fight noise nuisance and pollution. The equipment was presented by EPA’s Legal Officer, Shareefah Parks to Commissioner of Police (acting) Clifton Hicken at the Officers Training Centre, Eve Leary. One wonders where those items are now, and where are they being used?
The facts are simple: the PPP regime needs to get serious about many issues, and the problem of noise is one of them. Guyanese taxpayers are paying the salaries of government officials to do their jobs, unfortunately, many of those officials appear to be doing little more than occupying office space.
