The small town in Louisiana where no one sleeps and dementia is on the rise

Residents live along an isolated area Louisiana five mile road can’t remember the last time they had a good night’s sleep.

Hano Road, about an hour northwest of New Orleans, experiences deafening noise every day from 1 a.m. to 5 p.m. due to garbage trucks and gravel trucks driving down the road to drop off loads at the local gravel pit and dump.

While the small population of about 100 people has long had many restless nights, they have also seen an increase in dementia.

Experts believe this is because excessively loud noises trigger the body’s fight-or-flight response, releasing excess hormones that lead to inflammation and the death of brain cells.

Melvin Jennings, a 77-year-old Vietnam War veteran, said he can’t remember the last time he and his wife, Patricia, slept through the night.

One evening in 2019, the Jennings’ bedroom windows rattled as a procession of trucks sped by, one after another, just yards from their home.

And the consequences can be harmful. Mrs Jennings suffers from dementia, and research shows that being constantly woken up by loud noises – also known as ‘noise pollution’ – can lead to worsen dementia and increase the risk of heart disease.

Mr. Jennings told the Louisiana reliever: ‘It’s like torture. Especially when you’re in your own home. All night long… It scares you.’

Now, 96 residents have signed a petition urging the Louisiana Department of Environmental Quality (LDEQ) to push for noise regulations.

Louis Nick Joseph, who represents the district that includes Hano Road on the Tangipahoa Parish Council, said: “The problem is that because the parish is rural, we don’t have a noise bylaw.

And if we had one, how do you arrange that? My question is how would you regulate the sound?

Jamie Banks, an environmental scientist and founder of the nonprofit Quiet Communities, said the noise is “much more than a nuisance.”

Quiet Communities is suing the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) for a lack of enforcement of the Noise Control Act, which was enacted in 1972 and is intended to set noise standards.

Dave Williams, a retiree who lives on Hano Road, said he called Ms Banks at 3am in 2021 and complained that she was being ‘serenaded by the gravel trucks’.

“You know, people here are being abused,” he had said. “There are people down there suffering, right now… we have no one to help us.”

The noise had caused anxiety and vomiting in Mr. Williams, and his wife, Liz, suffered flare-ups of her fibromyalgia despite earplugs and sleep medication.

Noise pollution is noise above 65 decibels, which is about as loud as a normal conversation. However, just one truck driving on the road can measure up to 100 decibels.

The Tangipahoa Parish Council was trying to develop another route for trucks to and from the gravel pit and landfill, Joseph said.

But the new path would mean acquiring private property, and the owner had asked for it for more money than the municipality was allowed to spend, according to the council member.

Research has long shown that noise pollution has harmful effects on health.

Noise pollution has been shown to cause blood vessel damage and inflammation, leading to an increased risk of dementia and heart disease (stock image)

For example, a study published last year by the UK Health Security Agency found that in 2018, approximately 100,000 years of good health were lost because of road traffic.

In addition, 13,000 people were lost to railway noise and 17,000 to aircraft noise.

This was due to the noise which increases the risk of stroke, heart disease, diabetes, depressionand fear.

Loud noise is thought to trigger the release of hormones such as adrenaline and cortisol, which control the body’s stress response.

When these hormones are activated for long periods of time, they can damage the lining of blood vessels, leading to problems such as high blood pressure and heart disease.

The graph above shows the ten cities with the most noise pollution at night

A Report 2020 from the European Environment Agency, for example, found that 12,000 premature deaths and 48,000 cases of heart disease per year can be attributed to noise pollution in Europe.

Long-term exposure to loud noises has also been shown to affect cognitive function.

A review in Frontiers in public health found that when participants were consistently exposed to noise of about 57 decibels, they were 47 percent more likely to develop dementia than those who had less noise exposure.

The increased stress response from loud noises can lead to inflammation in the brain and cell death associated with dementia.

The noise can also have mental health effects. Mr Jennings said ‘it’s bad for my PTSD’, which left him scared at night before calming his wife down.

He said, ‘I don’t have anyone to help me all night. It’s up to me.

‘I’ll just have to do without the rest. And then I can hardly sleep during the day. That’s what confused me.’

Now the family and many others are waiting along the road for help that they fear will not come.

Mr Jennings said: ‘We want to live in peace again, and we are getting older. We need more peace than we are getting.”