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Tuesday, Dec 2nd 2003
A Deadly 200 Decibels ...
Dal professor and environmentalist Martin Willison was momentarily ,
and uncharactistically, at loss for words when asked to decribe - in
plain ordinary words - just how 'loud' 200 decibels really was.
"200 decibels is just way,way beyond the word 'loud' ", he said.
" At a distance of a metre, fish are vaporizied into tiny particles."
As one speaker proclaimed that, "solar panels never killed a fish,"
a monday night meeting of the Nova Scotia section of the
Green Party passed unanimously an emergency resolution opposing
seismic testing off Cape Breton and urging governments to turn instead
to safe, renewable energy resources such as solar and wind.
But before passing the motion, speaker after speaker criticized
journalists for burying the acoustic reality of the petroleum
industry's 'air gun arrays' behind such banal phrases
as "small scale seismic work".
Michael Marshall described the airgun as " in reality, its like
a giant Gatling gun playing the bass drum from a thousand
Heavy Metal concerts per barrel simultaneously but only much,
much louder - whales have hemorhaged to death at the ears,
its that loud."
Marshall said,"this 'small scale test' in reality is 200 plus decibel
air-burst explosions about every 50 ft over a 300 mile track
- about 30,000 loud explosions in relatively rapid sucession ."
Michael Oddy, Green Party candidate for Halifax in the last federal
election, said that all attempts to 'acoustically' convey to the
public all
the damage and disturbance these explosions produce in marine life
have been dismal failures.
"Human ear bones break and microphone diaphraphms pop at 160db
- this is 220 db - if you get close to record it you're
as dead as the whales."
for additional information , email the Nova Scotia section of the
Green Party at gpcns@chebucto.ns.ca
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