Protocol to manage construction noise in urban areas: Practical case in Bilbao municipality

Measures to control construction noise should go beyond measuring the impact and reacting to it. Identification of potential problems before they occur is the optimal approach. At the same time, proposed methodologies and protocols should be realistic and practical, since they will be implemented in a very tight framework, both in terms of limitation of budget and time constraints. Therefore, practical testing of them is more than welcome. This paper presents a procedure to define acoustic requirements to urban construction works and a methodology to answer to those requirements when executing the works. Both were defined as result of the collaboration between Tecnalia and a construction company in a real work developed in the city of Bilbao. Therefore, it considers the needs, capabilities and constraints expressed by a public local authority and a private construction company. The procedure includes an integral approach that considers: the prediction of the noise impacts, proposing abatement measures and analyzing their efficiency in real time during the timeline of the construction works. As result of the working process some criteria to adapt the requirements asked to different works are obtained. These criteria are related to: the type of works, classifying them in terms of how noisy they are; and the acoustic conditions of the area, the sensitivity to noise impact and existing environmental noise levels (consulting noise maps, developed by the city). The methodology can be applied when planning and executing construction works in an urban area. The methodology faces two key challenges: being accepted by authorities leading the works, so not interfering too much in the timing and costs of the works, and being applicable by the construction companies as part of their environmental control.