Ben-Nadav Hafri
speaker
333 appearances
4 recordings
1 series
first heard Dec 2024
last heard May 2025
Ben-Nadav Hafri’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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Appearances
The classic fire siren sound, like what you hear in your head if you imagine a fire truck right now, is called the Federal Q2B, and it's a whopping 123 decibels at 100 feet away. There's an actual corporation that makes the siren, Federal Signal. Fans post videos about the siren online. Here's what it sounds like. Maybe turn your volume down.
According to a helpful chart from Yale University, 123 decibels is just two decibels lower than the point at which, quote, pain begins. This would all be fine, except I kind of need my ears for my job. And this is why I began the log. The log has fields for all relevant data. Date, time, branch of emergency service, location in the house from which we have heard the siren.
There's also a field for reporter, Ben slash Julia, and another for notes. And then what is the final column?
This is the only field that matters. You see, there's a dog in my neighborhood who howls almost every time the siren goes off. And he sounds like this. A dog who, by the standards of people on my blog, is practically famous. Have you heard a dog who howls every time the sirens go off?
You have?
So he's talked about this dog to you?
What has he said?
do something about it it starts really low and guttural i thought it was like a werewolf or something i decided to take a two-pronged approach to my siren problem plan a i had to see if i could prove that the sirens in my neighborhood were dangerously unnecessarily loud and plan b i needed a sympathetic face for my cause Nobody really cares about podcasters, but everybody cares about dogs.
And I had to assume that that dog was howling along with the siren because he was, like me, in serious pain. So, find the dog, stop the siren. It'd be that simple. Except the dog was not immediately forthcoming. So I pushed ahead with plan A, noise research, which led me straight to Dr. Arlene Bronzaft.
What's the noise room?
Dr. Bronzaft is an 89-year-old environmental psychologist who has been called the noise queen of New York City. She's done major noise studies, worked for five mayors. She grew up in Brooklyn and lives in a lovely, tidy apartment on the Upper East Side. Someone was jackhammering the street outside the building. And yet, you couldn't hear a thing. Double glazed windows. Of course.
She took me to her noise room. Noise room sounds possibly like the opposite of what I mean.
Wow. How did you get it so quiet in here?
Yep.
Yep.
Bronzeaft started her work during the golden age of noise control, the 1970s, when the EPA began regulating noise. Her early work demonstrated that noise isn't just annoying, it can get in the way of kids learning in school. And she just kept going from there.
That all checked out for me. Of course the sirens are too loud, but it can take a while for the research to make its way into policy. Now we have research linking even small changes in overall noise to significantly increased risk of heart disease. To say nothing of stress, poor sleep and its associated ailments, and crucially, the effect of noise on exasperated podcasters.
I left that meeting full of hope. There's no doubt that sirens are dangerously loud. I just needed to find the data to back this up and figure out a new solution, like Arlene said. I went straight to the library and started digging around. But the more I saw about how clear it is already that these sirens are crazy, the less I believed that that data was going to make any difference in the world.
And then, I found a different set of data. Not something about noise, but something that undermined the very foundation of the siren's existence. We'll be right back. Berrien County, Michigan sits on the southeastern shore of Lake Michigan. It's not too far from Kalamazoo. Quaint lakefront towns, golf courses, quiet. Unless you work as a paramedic.
Jonathan Beyer, former EMT and now medical director for the Berrien County Health Department.
Showing 161–180 of 333 · page 9 of 17
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