Word: sonics
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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...grave drawback: it is in close proximity to several Navy and Air Force bases, including Hamilton Air Force Base now being used by the over-2,000-m.p.h. SR-71 reconnaissance plane. As a result, Santa Barbara, by the count of one irate citizen, was bombed with a sonic boom for 75 successive days this summer. "It's ghastly," says Mrs. George M. Sidenberg, both the wife and mother of Navy aviators. "One boom nearly threw me out of bed at 10 p.m. I was here for the 1950 Santa Barbara earthquake, and it felt just like that...
...booms on his seismograph, says that they leave tracks on the recording drums like those of minor earthquakes. In response, Santa Barbarans have been bombarding city hall to do something. Last week city hall did. By a vote of 6-1, the city council passed an ordinance declaring a sonic boom an "unlawful public nuisance," with fines up to $500 or 60 days in jail...
Thus Santa Barbara became the first municipality to ban the boom, but it is far from being alone in discovering that it could not live with the boom without hating it. Unlike noise from a subsonic jet, which builds up gradually as the plane approaches, sonic boom comes as a bang without warning...
Since the Air Force's SR-71 began flying over Chicago three months ago, the Chanute Air Force Base in downstate Illinois has received 1,630 letters of complaint, 1,497 of them claiming damage (usually cracked plaster and glass) caused by sonic booms. In Boston, the Air Force and Air Guard are formally investigating a recent boom that, according to newspaper accounts, knocked scores of pedestrians off their feet, leaving "a trail of terror...
...providing a reasonable excuse for the U.S. to drop its own version. And there is the boom itself. "More and more people are getting fed up with it," Shurcliff comments, referring to boom tests being conducted over selected cities. He has received only four letters in favor of sonic booms--one from a man who wrote that the loud noise "made him proud to be an American." League members are urged to write their Congressmen and local newspapers, and Shurcliff feels that "the tide will run more strongly in our favor." The problem is that the longer it takes...