To the Editor:
Picture this: Another lovely Vineyard summer morning. Your house guests have (finally) departed, one of you is pouring the coffee, the other buttering the toast, and you both are looking forward to some peace and quiet — when suddenly the air is filled with VROOMVROOMBRZOOM, the harsh and unmistakable sound of a gas-powered leaf blower.
Or maybe everyone else is still sleeping, and you’re alone with your coffee and the newspaper. You’re sitting on the deck, enjoying the morning air and counting your blessings — until VROOMVROOMBRZOOM, a gas-powered leaf blower at work.
While you can’t avoid hearing it, the sound may not be coming from your yard, nor your immediate neighbor’s yard either. The culprit could be three or four houses away, because two-stroke gas-powered engines emit low-frequency sounds, which travel farther and penetrate more deeply than high-frequency sounds.
Gas-powered leaf blowers do much more than destroy your peace and quiet. Their loud noise can lead to hearing loss, which is why experts recommend wearing noise blockers when using them. And their ever-present VROOMVROOMBRZOOM can make existing health challenges, like heart issues, diabetes, and all sorts of mental and cognitive problems, worse.
These pernicious machines are also damaging our environment by contributing a considerable amount of smog-forming pollution, particulates and hydrocarbons, to the air we breathe. For comparison’s sake, let’s consider just one gas-powered leaf blower and your typical car with an internal combustion engine. Believe it or not, you’d have to make seven or eight round-trips between Woods Hole and Boston to match what just one gas-powered leaf blower spews out in just one hour! That’s 15 or so hours of driving, just to match the gas-powered leaf blower’s pollution output.
And how many gas-powered leaf blowers do you suppose there are on our Island? Hundreds? Thousands?
At the town meetings in five towns this spring, we voters have the opportunity to phase out and eventually ban gas-powered leaf blowers. Previous efforts to restrict or ban them have failed. For one thing, most landscapers opposed them, citing the cost of electric gas blowers. However, that shouldn’t be an issue this year, because new models are cheaper, more efficient, and longer-lasting.
Some well-meaning previous attempts, such as one rejected by Edgartown voters last spring, would have banned gas-powered leaf blowers immediately, which would have placed an unacceptable financial burden on landscapers. The common-sense legislation we will vote on in April addresses this issue. It restricts use to 8 am to 5pm, Monday to Friday, with no commercial use allowed on Sundays, and none whatsoever on holidays. Spring and fall cleanups are allowed in 2025, 2026, and 2027, and the full ban goes into effect on Jan. 1, 2028.
I hope all registered voters will turn out for their town meeting and vote yes on the measure to restrict and eventually ban gas-powered leaf blowers.
John Merrow
Edgartown
I hope all registered voters will go out and vote to protect our rights. The town shouldn’t be able to tell me when and with what I can clean leaves on my own property. I work a full week and sometimes Saturday doesn’t come with the conditions required for outdoor yard work. We aren’t all on this island to vacation. Is the town going to cover the $1600 for a new battery powered blower? It’s incredible that people’s lives are going so well that leaf blowers are the biggest detractor to their happiness. Now the vta benches are gone so they can pretend we don’t have a homeless issue, soon they will pull a shade entirely over us unsightly working class people (at least the ones who haven’t been forced off the island) I hope everyone makes it out to protect our rights!
Although I wholeheartedly agree with you, that gas leaf blowers should be banned, I wonder who is going to enforce this new restriction? We don’t appear to have enough police officers in Oak Bluffs to enforce the three-way stop sign at the end of my street, let alone to silence gas leaf blowers. I’m so old that I remember the days when leaves were taken care of by raking (which they still are, in my yard). Even for old folks like us, it’s not a bad form of exercise, and the results are a tonic. Of course, we do it slowly and patiently, but we also don’t like to destroy winter habitats for small animals, particularly this year, as winter seems so reluctant to give up to spring. Raking for youngsters brimming over with energy and enthusiasm has been a way to make money in the past–not to take it out of the mouths of landscapers.
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