SRQ

I know for a fact that I will not be making it off campus this week since it's the first week back from Spring Break and we're going to be pressing on ahead in my CA classes. I went home to Minnesota over break, like I do on just about all school breaks, so I've been to the SRQ airport quite a few times over the years.

It's extremely nice to have an airport so close, for when you need it, but other times it can get annoying with how much noise it causes. At home I live about 20 minutes from the Minneapolis airport, and it gets noisy from time to time even being that far away, yet here at Ringling I hardly ever hear an airplane overhead.

Not many people think of noise as being a sort of pollution, but if it disrupts your everyday life I'd classify it as pollution. Most outdoor noise is from either construction or transportation vehicles like airplanes, motor vehicles, and railways. It can even affect peoples' health because when people get annoyed, it usually leads to aggression, high stress, sleeping disturbance, and hypertension. Not to mention it helps aid in hearing loss, but that's usually if you're exposed to noise everyday for a certain amount of time.

I thought it was strange that SRQ, even though it is a small airport, is so quiet so I did a little research and found out that SRQ has a noise barrier design in place. There was a lot of mumbo jumbo I couldn't understand, but I was able to gather that they have two noise barriers: one extending along Runway 14, and a noise wall to the northwest of where they extended Runway 14. I never realized them, but apparently they have a nice aesthetic design so the community doesn't complain about them.