Noise Impact Assessments provide valuable insights to energy and resource companies and regulators around noise-related impacts of facility operations on surrounding communities. And, completing NIA’s in the early planning stages has been shown to support better equipment decisions, provide direction on facility location, and result in less regulatory and financial risk once the project has been completed. But NIA’s are frequently put on the back burner and completed in the late stages of project development, often with some unintended financial and societal risks. So, how can we get the conversation started about noise earlier in the planning process?

What if different proposed facility locations could be mapped out with noise impacts identified before a project starts, including considerations from other nearby noise-emitting facilities? What if different equipment types and quantities could be assessed for each of these locations? How would this insight change project location selection, scheduling and budgets?

The team at Patching Associates wanted to find a new approach to Noise Impact Assessments to provide clients with more insight to their noise risk earlier in their project planning, and to provide guidance on the type of NIA best suited for each facility. Leveraging 30 years of measuring sound, thousands of NIA’s completed and hundreds of thousands of field measurement data points, Patching Associates created an innovative online tool for quickly assessing facility noise-related risk.