The playlist hasn’t been identified, but western Salem County residents are hoping it includes “The Day the Music Died.”
It has nothing to do with that lyric in Don McLean’s “American Pie,” the 1970s anthem recalling the 1959 plane crash that took the lives of rockers Buddy Holly, Ritchie Valens and J.P. “The Big Bopper” Richardson. It’s that hundreds, perhaps thousands, of people who live in places like Pennsville, Carneys Point and Pennsville want someone to turn off the oversized boom box that is wrecking their sleep.
When first heard last year, the loud, pulsating sounds that prompted more than 100 complaints to local police departments hadn’t even been described universally as “music.” It could have been a high-speed secret military plane being tested in the middle of the night, or, as has been suspected at the U.S. embassy in Havana, a plot to cause hearing loss and other illnesses with sound waves.
The source was a regional mystery for two months until Penns Grove Police Chief John Stranahan took it upon himself one December evening to follow the trail of booms. It took him over the Delaware Memorial Bridge and into Wilmington, Delaware, where he discovered a van with huge speakers blasting music in a skatepark near Seventh Street. The chief alerted local police, but the van and its occupants vanished before officials with proper jurisdictional authority could respond.
First, let’s extend belated kudos to the chief, not only for solving the puzzle, but for doing it on Christmas Eve, of all nights. Not much was heard in South Jersey about the sounds after that, so the presumption was that Wilmington’s finest had taken care of business. However, this past weekend, there were multiple reports on Facebook that the racket was back.
Stranahan’s observations last year were that the speakers were aimed across the nearby Delaware River, thereby sending the bad vibrations directly into Salem County’s river towns. Cue the bad jokes about the late Chris Farley’s “van down by the river” sketches on “Saturday Night Live,” but a van permits a movable feast of sickening syncopation. Like illicit drag racers who scatter when they hear the fuzz are coming, the van blasters may now be at a different location. Or, there might be more than one vehicle.
Whatever, it’s Wilmington and Delaware’s job to tone them down. If some of the operators are youths, there has to be a curfew calling for them to be off the streets between midnight and 3 a.m. If they’re older, they must be violating noise restrictions that are supposed to be enforced by the cops or state health and environmental authorities.
It’s hard to explain why more sane residents of surrounding Delaware neighborhoods aren’t peeved by the loud music, but questions about how sound waves travel are best left for Bose engineers. It shouldn’t matter, though, if all the complaints are coming from across the river.
Get out there with decibel meters. Write summonses. Impound vehicles, if that’s allowed. For South Jersey authorities, the goal should be follow-up with counterparts in Delaware, something that was apparently lacking last year. Incident reports from New Jersey and response reports from Delaware should be shared on a consistent basis.
Some online wags suggest escalation as New Jersey’s best solution. Rent some even bigger speakers, they say, plant them on the Salem County riverfront, and fire some teen-dispersing classical music at Wilmington. It might work, but mutually assured hearing destruction is a scary relic of the Cold War.
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