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Washington Grove, fearing road noise, to review sound studies

State says ICC would be too far away to pose a problem

Wednesday, March 8, 2006

Washington Grove is planning to hire a sound engineer to review two state studies that have evaluated how the town could be impacted by traffic noise from the planned Intercounty Connector.

‘‘This is a grave concern for Washington Grove,” the town’s mayor, John Compton, said. ‘‘The noise level has invariably increased in the last 10 to 12 years.”

Town leaders say they want to review the findings of tests by the State Highway Administration, done in March, 2004, and again last August, that did not forecast that noise from the ICC would be loud enough to warrant building a sound wall beside the small Gaithersburg-area town.

Washington Grove, whose character is defined largely by its reputation as a quiet refuge from urban sprawl, is among many communities along the planned 18-mile-long ICC, a $2.4 billion highway whose proponents say will alleviate traffic by linking often-congested parts of Montgomery and Prince George’s counties.

If approved, the project, a controversial measure that has been in the works for decades, is expected to begin late this year or early 2007 moving west to east, state authorities say, meaning construction would start near where the ICC would link to Interstate 370 — not far from Washington Grove.

‘‘We think there’s going to be a significant noise increase,” Compton said, noting the potential impact the ICC could have on Interstate 370.

But state authorities say the town, already dealing with noise from nearby railroad tracks and Interstate 370, would be a quarter mile from the highway — too far for potential increased noise from the ICC to be a problem.

They also note that a sound wall will, in fact, be placed between the town and the ICC — but for residences closer to the planned route.

‘‘The noise levels within the Washington Grove Historic District will remain essentially unchanged once the ICC is built,” Bruce M. Grey of the State Highway Administration said in an August letter to Robert Booher, a town resident and chair of the Historic Preservation Commission.

The town says that the state measured noises during non-peak traffic hours and at locations that wouldn’t be the most prone to sounds from the ICC, painting an unrealistically pretty picture of the project’s impacts on the town.

‘‘We just think their sound study was done in a very advantageous way to themselves,” said town Councilman Darrell Anderson.

The state says its noise studies continuously measure sounds in 20-minute intervals over 24-hour periods, and that test results reflect the noisiest hour of the day — which, when cars are jammed bumper-to-bumper, may not always be rush hour.

Compton said the town is planning to spend $5,000 to review the state findings, and that the sooner, the better.

‘‘We can’t quarrel with their numbers until we get our own numbers,” Compton said. ‘‘For all we know they’ll come out the same.”