The will be an upcoming meeting of SCREAAM on 2/16 at 6:30pm. If you are interested in working with fellow community members to do something about the jet noise in San Francisco please come join us to plan what actions we can take. If you have any questions please contact us via our Contact Page.
Date: Thursday 2/16/17
Time: 6:30PM-8:30PM
Location: Ingleside Public Library meeting room
1298 Ocean Ave, San Francisco, CA 94112
BOSTON, MASS – This week, Congressman Stephen F. Lynch (D-Boston), joined by members of the bipartisan Quiet Skies Caucus, introduced H.R. 598, the Airplane Impacts Mitigation (AIM) Act of 2017.
In a press release from congressman Lynch, congresswoman Anna Eshoo who represents the South Bay comments:
New flight paths implemented under the FAA’s NextGen program have generated alarming and untenable increases in noise impacts across my entire Congressional District. I consistently hear from constituents who are impacted daily and are concerned about air pollution and other negative health impacts of airplane overflights. This legislation goes to the heart of this issue, ensuring there will be scientific data developed and measured to assess the NextGen program and its effect on my constituents.
The complete press release is available here.
The next SFO Roundtable meeting is next week on Wednesday evening. If you are able to go please make a comment about your concerns about jet noise.
Date: Wednesday Feb 1, 2017
Time: 7:00pm
Location: David Chetcuti Community Room – Millbrae City Hall
450 Popular Avenue – Millbrae, CA 94030
A meeting packet and agenda are available in pdf here.
Here is an interesting jet noise complaint post from the other side of the country. There certainly are similarities with what is going on in some parts of San Francisco these days… and with how some residents feel about our jet noise situation.
https://theoutline.com/post/834/we-found-the-dc-resident-who-filed-thousands-of-the-city-s-noise-complaints
SCREAAM held its 3rd meeting this week. Following are the meeting notes. They are also available as a PDF file.
We began the meeting by introducing SCREAAM to new members, discussing SCREAAM’s mission and talking in detail about: “What’s the issue that we are trying to resolve?” We then reviewed our group’s accomplishments to date: (1) Forming SCREAAM in Meeting #1 – Mid 2016, (2) our first formal letter (basically, our manifesto) to SFO Rountable (available at screaam.org), (3) our Meeting #2 with visits from speakers from the Mayor’s Office/SFO Noise follks in Oct 2016. At that meeting, we decided that SCREAAM will be officially continue as a group and our various activities are worth moving forward with. (3) We have also created many SCREAAM materials: a website, a blog, a good “about us” page, key images, Powerpoint presentation / PDF that summarizes our concerns/request, etc. (4) We also just initiated requests for media coverage, continued Local awareness via NextDoor website, started a Facebook page, tried to initiate contact VIPs at the FAA (and TRACON) for more direct relationships, met with local politicians (supervisors), went to Oakland Airport Noise meetings, and finally (5) got everyone together again for Meeting #3 – see below for everything we got done…
Latest Update of “What is Going On”
We also reviewed the most critical recent document that has the potential to affect the skies above us in the next few years – the letter written by aviation consultants on behalf of the SFO Roundtable to be submitted to Congresspersons Speier, Eschoo, and Farr and that ultimately goes to the FAA as “what the Bay Area is officially asking the FAA for…” (Link http://sforoundtable.org/wp-content/uploads/2016/11/20161117_FAA-Initiative-Response.pdf) To some extent, our concerns are all reflected in the letter, but no one is sure what kind of outcome and impact that letter will have – so SCREAAM operations will continue in the meanwhile. Any results from this letter will take months or even YEARS (yes, years) to come to fruition – depending on the magnitude of the changes.
Decisions Made During the Meeting
We made 3 key decisions regarding the organization’s overall strategy and outlined over 20 objectives/tactics that SCREAAM will be moving forward with in 2017. The objectives include such things as which organizations we plan to collaborate with, what media coverage we will be seeking, which tools we will be creating/using, how we plan to grow the group, and how we plan to approach possible legal action. If you are a SCREAAM participant and wish to receive a detailed list of the meeting notes, please get on the SCREAAM mailing list by contacting us and giving us your email.
Note: We plan on accomplishing our objectives with the minimum amount of effort if possible from the group – in order to not waste any of our members’ and volunteers’ time and energy.
Next Meeting – Sneak Preview of January Agenda
SCREAAM’s Next meeting (Meeting #4) will be held in January 2017, but the date / time / location is still being determined. Stay tuned. We will continue discussing important administrative tasks and fine tuning the group’s strategy. Importantly, we will be handing out dozens of specific tasks and to-do’s to members and volunteers at this meeting. Please attend…. It will be “all hands on deck.”
***Thank you*** to everyone involved with SCREAAM and have a blazingly successful end to 2016.
Holiday gift idea: EARPLUGS!
See you in 2017!
The SFO Roundtable is holding a meeting tomorrow.
Date: Wednesday November 2nd
Time: 7:00pm
Location: 450 Poplar Ave, Millbrae CA, 94030
The agenda is at http://sforoundtable.org/2016/11/agenda-72/
Please make it if you can and support action to help jet noise in San Francisco. They will be taking comments from the public. The more comments that come from San Francisco residents the better.
The SFO roundtable held a technical working group meeting on Thursday. Four SCREAAM members were there as well as many residents from Brisbane, Pacifica and Daly City. Several members of the FAA attended and our Roundtable representative David Takashima was present. A little background on what the Roundtable is working on: the FAA has agreed to consider changes that would help with the noise and the Roundtable is finalizing a letter to the FAA outlining what the requested changes are. Some of the proposed changes that could benefit us are:
Flights out of Oakland to southern destinations often fly a route known as CNDEL. They are often being turned off this route early which brings them further south over San Francisco. The Roundtable is asking the FAA to keep these flights on the published routes and not turn them early.
Flights out of SFO to southern destinations mainly use a route known as SSTIK in which they take off heading north over the bay then they make a U turn, over either Brisbane or the southern part of San Francisco and fly south over Pacifica. The Roundtable is asking the FAA to move these flights further east into the bay and have them fly further north before making the U-turn. This would allow them to get higher up before they fly over land.
Two other requests being made that can help are: 1) have flights fly across the Golden Gate rather than San Francisco. 2) have them take take off on the runway that faces the south. However these would only be able to used for a very small percentage of flights, mainly late at night, because typically other air traffic uses the airspace necessary for these flight paths.
When the FAA members were asked to comment about these requests they repeatedly said that this will take 18 – 24 months before anything could be changed and it would actually probably be longer since they have their hands full making NextGen changes in other areas. And they did not mention that after two years they could just come back to us and say none of these changes will work for some reason or other.
Do you want to wait for over two years while the FAA messes up peoples lives in other cities with new flight paths before there is even a possibility of some improvement? We need to take action if we want to get relief anytime soon. At the last SCREAAM meeting David Takashima suggested it would be helpful to contact our elected officials about this issue. Do you agree it will be effective to lobby our representatives to pressure the FAA to act faster? Do you have other ideas about what will be effective? Please leave a comment with your thoughts.
SCREAAM held its 2nd meeting on October 3rd. SFO Roundtable representitive for San Francisco, David Takashima, and Bert Ganoung from the SFO Noise Abatement Team came and discussed what is going on with efforts to fix noise issues. For more details on the meeting please see the meeting notes.
The Chronicle just ran an article about pollution from jet planes. Yet another reason we need to be concerned about all the planes flying so low over our neighborhoods. The article is at
http://www.sfgate.com/business/article/Business-News-Roundup-July-26-8414184.php
Other communities around the Bay Area are also affected by jet noise and are gathering in the hopes to reverse or drastically change the jet noise current situation.
An important meeting was held tonight in Mountain View, California and it made the Bay Area News. It seemed like a great turnout…
For some context, the following paragraph was related to the meeting:
FAA’s March 2015 NextGen implementation for SFO arrivals has created huge negative impacts upon people from Santa Cruz to Palo Alto. The final meeting of the Select Committee is tonight, in Mountain View. The meeting offers a public forum to speak up about your concerns and, hopefully, get FAA off its butt to repair the damages NextGen has inflicted. Of course, impacted residents are encouraged to attend tonight.
Most of their concerns are ARRIVALS related.
We wish the Peninsula and South Bay folks lots of success with negotiating some much needed relief from the jet noise down there.
-SCREAAM-
S.C.R.E.A.A.M. 