Some reached for melatonin for their pets and for themselves. They also downloaded white-noise apps. Others resorted to earplugs.
But those remedies for the sleep-deprived have offered little respite in one Connecticut shoreline city, where a phantom humming sound has reverberated persistently in several neighborhoods in recent years.
The low-frequency noise, which has drawn comparisons to a kitchen range downdraft or a Shop-Vac, has prompted more than 200 complaints from residents of West Haven, Conn., who have struggled to identify the cause.
So has the city of about 55,000 people, home to part of Yale University’s West Campus, beaches, industrial facilities and New Haven-style “apizza,” pronounced ah-beetz.
Last month, the City Council voted to spend $16,000 to hire an acoustics expert to place noise-monitoring equipment at several locations to try to solve the mystery.
Most of the complaints have been clustered in a part of the city known as West Shore, where a food ingredient plant known for making edible sparkles is drawing renewed scrutiny despite its past sound-dampening efforts.
The humming noise has penetrated dense building materials, including the brick exterior and plaster walls of a home owned by Donna Rzasa.
“In the beginning, I think we all thought we were losing our mind,” Ms. Rzasa, 56, said in an interview.
Ms. Rzasa recalled how she has been awakened in the middle of the night by the humming, which she first noticed last year. It has not been conducive to her early-morning schedule delivering mail for the U.S. Postal Service.
“Once you’re up, you’re done,” she said.
Eight houses away from Ms. Rzasa’s home, Kimberly Nunes, 38, said the noise had been a nagging problem for about three years.
“I can be laying down in bed, and you can still hear it with the television sound on,” said Ms. Nunes, who works in health care.
In December, Ms. Nunes started an online petition that more than 150 people signed asking the city to take action on the noise.
Dorinda Borer, West Haven’s mayor and a former state representative, said it was her hope that the acoustics study, which should take about four weeks, would pinpoint the sound’s source.
“I think if you had a continual noise, you know, this would drive you crazy, right?” Ms. Borer said. “There’s no relief from it sometimes, and it impacts people in different ways. So there may be four people living in a home, two people hear it, two people don’t.”
Erica D. Walker, an assistant professor of epidemiology at the Brown University School of Public Health who runs the Community Noise Lab housed at the university, said low-frequency noises can disrupt sleep cycles and cause anxiety and depression.
“People feel imprisoned by it,” Dr. Walker said. “It’s kind of destroying the acoustical fabric of a community. It’s anxiety-driven. You appeal to authorities. They don’t know what to do about it. They think you’re crazy.”
In the United States, she said, scientific research on the side effects of low-frequency noises has been more focused in military settings than civilian ones.
“It’s hard to abate,” she said. “It’s hard to pinpoint. There’s an incredibly disorienting effect to it.”
Herb Singleton, an acoustical consultant and president of Cross-Spectrum Acoustics Inc., which has helped other communities study similar disturbances, said a sound’s frequency component is different from its loudness component, which is measured in decibels.
Low-frequency noises, like a rumble, have longer wavelengths that can cover greater distances, according to Mr. Singleton, who said cellphone recordings of the noise were not likely to convey the magnitude of the problem because they are designed to suppress those sounds.
Most of the time, Mr. Singleton said, acoustics experts are able to zero in on a culprit.
“It’s typically mechanical equipment,” he said.
In Connecticut, noise traveling from an industrial zone to a residential area is considered excessive if it goes above 61 decibels during the day and 51 decibels at night, roughly the level of a normal conversation or a household refrigerator, under the state’s and West Haven’s noise laws.
If the city can prove that the noise sticks out above other tones, those limits decrease by five decibels.
John Carrano, West Haven’s human services commissioner, has taken informal readings with a decibel meter at dozens of locations, including at his home in a neighborhood overlooking Glanbia Nutritionals, the company that makes edible sparkles that are used in confections.
A vast majority of those readings did not exceed permitted levels, according to Mr. Carrano, who said during a City Council meeting on Jan. 12 that the city was required to isolate the noise and prove its origin before it could issue a violation.
“We’d be out at 11 o’clock at night, 2 o’clock in the morning, 5 o’clock in the morning, trying to find these sounds,” Mr. Carrano said.
In a statement, Glanbia Nutritionals, which is based in Ireland, said it was committed to being a responsible neighbor and had taken steps to address noise, including installing fully enclosed air compressors, upgrading mufflers and constructing targeted sound barriers.
“Independent third-party sound testing, including both extended and multi-location assessments, indicates that our site operates within applicable limits,” the company said. “We have nonetheless implemented a series of precautionary measures to improve sound management at the site.”
Christopher E. Vargo Jr., the City Council chairman, said he accompanied Mr. Carrano to investigate the noise after residents complained.
“It’s kind of like driving down the highway, and you open up the rear passenger window only,” he said in an interview, describing the noise. “You have this, for lack of a better word, like a strong, intense whoosh.”
Tracy Sabia, 66, a retiree whose home overlooks the industrial zone and the food ingredient plant, said she was already dealing with sleep apnea when she started hearing the humming.
“It’s just terrible,” she said. “It’s 24/7. No matter what room you go in, you hear it.”
At Ms. Rzasa’s home, which is about 1.3 miles from the industrial zone, her dog, Quigley, a rescue mix, has also shown signs of being agitated by the noise.
“Twelve-thirty this morning, my dog got me up and all I heard was the humming,” she said.
Ms. Rzasa said she downloaded a white-noise app on her phone, but it drained the battery during the night.
Then she tried using a similar feature on her Alexa-enabled speaker, but she quit using it because she needed to pay for a subscription. So she invested in a white-noise machine.
“At least we know we’re not crazy,” she said.
Neil Vigdor covers breaking news for The Times, with a focus on politics.
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