[EDITOR’S NOTE: The following is a Letter to the Editor, written by a Reader. It does not necessarily reflect the opinion of The B-Town Blog nor its staff:]
Hello Neighbors,
If you have been hearing more airplane noise lately, it is not your imagination. We want to alert the community to this issue. We need proactive community action to ensure the Burien City Council and the Burien City Manager advocate for the citizens of Burien to preserve the peace and quality of our neighborhoods.
The next City Council meeting will be at the Burien City Hall (400 SW 152nd Street) on Monday, Sept. 19, starting at 7 p.m.
We encourage you to attend; arrive early to sign up to speak before the Council and let your opposition to this noise pollution be heard. A large turnout will underscore the importance of this issue.
The community is organizing rapidly to address this problem and we expect to nominate a steering committee of volunteers to coordinate and organize the opposition efforts.
The following article appeared in The B-Town Blog on August 23, 2016:
“Retired Alaska Airlines pilot Larry Cripe, who lives on 23rd Ave SW, said he has become “extremely concerned over the last four weeks about the new aircraft noise … and spent many hours on the phone with the FAA discussing what is going on.”
Before the Council slipped into biennial budget mode, longtime area resident Cripe said low plane flyovers started about three weeks earlier during the rev-up of Seafair with the turning of flights taking off and turning westbound during Blue Angel practices.
Cripe says he is tracking on an application on his phone and sees 50 or 60 northbound – primarily turboprop planes – turning over Burien, starting around 4 a.m.
“It goes to 10, 11 o’clock at night and sometimes they are every five to 10 minutes,” adding that some of the flights are “as low as 1,500 feet.”
He said he discussed the flights with the Federal Aviation Agency locally and “the head guy” says they are “trying to disperse the noise around Puget Sound.”
The noise of the turning planes “is significant” Cripe said.
“As a community, I can tell you now that if we are not careful and allow this to continue they are going to shove it down our throat and we are going to be impacted in a very big way – we are going to have flight paths that are going straight down to Des Moines.”
“As a city, we are going to have to get involved and I am going to be very active in pursuing to terminate this process,” Cripe said.”
If this is of interest and/or concern to you, please let me know. This issue started recently and time is of the essence for action, before these noisy overflights become the norm and destroy our quiet enjoyment of our neighborhoods.
Please feel free to share this information and get the word out.
Thanks,
Susan Plecko
Hello Neighbors,[Have an opinion or concern you’d like to share with our ~80,000+ monthly Readers? Please send us your Letter to the Editor via email. Include your full name, please cite your sources, remain civil and – pending our careful review – we’ll consider publishing it.]