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Daniel Modlin

7-8 minutes

The Hoh Rainforest located in Washington State’s Olympic

National Park is a pretty magical place. Bordering the Pacific
Ocean, the rainforest region of the peninsula is filled with
deciduous old-growth, moss-laden forests that sparkle amidst the
infamous drizzle of the Pacific Northwest.

While hiking, you can hear the crunch of a twig beneath your
boots, and each drop of rain individually splattering into molecules
as it returns to the sponge-like soil below. It’s so quiet and peaceful
in fact, that it may be the quietest place in the continental United
States. In the late 1990 s, Gordon Hempton, an Emmy-winning
sound engineer, traveled the world, searching for some of the
quietest places ever. He found it and in 2005, dropped a red rock,
marking the tiny corner the One Square Inch of Silence.

Almost instantly, the spot became a world-renowned tourist

destination. To be clear, if you were looking for a place that was
actually devoid entirely of sound, this has never been that. Instead,
Hempton says he and others in the field define natural quiet as “a
place where there is the least amount of human noise pollution.”

This means that despite it being one of the most visited national
parks, you can still hear birds chirping, raindrops falling, and the
sound of your own breath. At least, you could. As of 2018, it lost its
claim to fame, and if you travel there today, you may not get the
natural, peaceful experience you were searching for. In fact, you
may get exactly the opposite.

It’s not the influx of social media-crazed tourists creating noise as

is the case at other parks, nor is there development adjacent to the
park causing issues, either. Instead, the culprit just so happens to
involve the U.S. Navy and fighter jets.

Despite the remote locale of the Olympic Peninsula, just a few

minutes away via aircraft is Naval Air Station Whidbey, a base
which has been operational since WWII. At the station are about
80 Growler Jets, a high-profile, highly advanced jet used for
electronic warfare that has another claim to fame: it’s one of the
loudest in the skies, at least according to a 2009 report on jet
engine noise reduction performed by the U.S. Naval Research
Advisory Committee.

According to people who have been on the Peninsula during

flights, the sound is startling.

“It’s crazy,” Hempton told The Daily Beast. “These are called
‘Growlers’ for a reason. They literally growl. It’s so loud that it can
be confused with an avalanche or a flash flood. You stop thinking
about anything else, when you hear it, and begin to wonder if
maybe you should move to higher ground, towards safety.”

The sound is described by the Navy in their most recent

Environmental Impact Statement as comparable to that of a
“garbage disposal.” To that, Rob Smith, the Pacific Northwest
director of the National Parks Conservation Association (NPCA),
an environmental nonprofit asks, “a garbage disposal may not
make your ears bleed, but is that what you’re expecting to hear
when you go out into the rainforest?”

Despite the fact that these fighter jets are impairing one of the
most peaceful parks and places in the United States, the Navy has
no plans to remedy it. Instead, per their Environmental Impact
Statement published in late 2020 they are planning on increasing
the number of flights they perform over the Peninsula.

For the Navy, this base, and the military operation areas over the
park where Growlers are flown is a “critical training area due to the
unencumbered airspace that is set aside to support safe aircrew
training,” where pilots practice “large-scale conflict, homeland
defense, and anti-piracy operations,” among other things, Michael
Welding, a spokesman at Naval Station Whidbey Island told The
Daily Beast.

However, for Lauren Kuehne, an environmental scientist (formerly

with the University of Washington) who now runs her own
consulting firm, there is a big disconnect going on between the
mission of the Park Service and the Navy’s flight practice.

“The National Park System is required by law to manage

wilderness so that you don’t notice the imprint of people,” she said,
pointing to the NPS’ mandate. “They don’t use helicopters unless
it’s a life or death situation, and when I was doing my studies, I had
to camouflage my recorders so people wouldn’t notice them. Then
you have these jets flying, unregulated because there is no
jurisdiction over the airspace.”
This is true—as Smith of the NPCA confirmed: “The jurisdictional
boundary of the NPS stops at the top of the vegetation, and the
FAA does not manage for environmental impacts.”

This means that, effectively, no one studied the potential impacts

of the jets. Kuehne set out to do a study that was largely the first of
its kind.

Her first study was conducted in 2016, shortly after the Navy
announced they were planning on increasing the amount of flights
over the Park. She told The Daily Beast the purpose of the study
was to “answer basic questions that no one had the answer to:
how many hours a day can you hear the planes and what kinds of
planes are they?”

Keuhne found that someone on a six-hour, peaceful hike could

experience one hour’s worth of jet engine noise on a given
weekday. This means that at least a fifth of the time during
weekday hours aircraft could be heard over the Western part of the
Olympic Peninsula. She also concluded that almost 90 percent of
air traffic was from Growlers and other military aircrafts.

“I thought this would lead to meaningful conversations about how

to address the issue,” Kuehne said.

This is not what happened. Instead, a battle of op-eds shortly

followed.

Instead of focusing on the basics the study was trying to prove, the
Navy published an op-ed in The Seattle Times that refuted several
facets of the study—microphone calibration for one—and some of
the conclusions, including the impacts the noise might have on the
behavior of orcas.
However, Kuehne argues in her own op-ed that the impacts on
orcas’ behavior was never a conclusion she drew, but instead,
another question that she believes necessitated more research.
Kuehne went on to question why the Navy decided to focus on
certain aspects of her study, instead of recognizing and seeking to
address the simple issue of noise pollution she asserts she
thoroughly proved out.

“I think the biggest issue is they are not engaging with the
community,” Kuehne said. “Their attitude has largely been to say
‘Prove it.’ They are basically going to deny this until the last
possible minute.”

Smith added that it isn’t so much about stopping the flights, but
perhaps doing them elsewhere. “This is not the right place to do
this,” he told The Daily Beast, “And they’re creating a problem.

“We want the Navy to help us defend Olympic National Park, one
of the few special places we have left,” he said. “Isn’t that what
defense is supposed to be all about, anyway?”