One person in Chicago made 11,000 noise complaints about O'Hare airport

Last January, the Chicago Department of Aviation's Noise Management System (ANMS) fielded 6,321 noise complaints about O'Hare International Airport. This January, there were 39,500 complaints about the aviation noise, but the increase itself isn't the remarkable part: it's the fact that almost 25,000 of those complaints were registered by six – SIX! – people.

According to Jalopnik, ANMS uses 32 permanent noise monitors throughout the city to provide accurate measurements of the noise levels in the neighborhoods surrounding Chicago's two airports, O'Hare and Midway International Airport. Every month, ANMS publishes a report that summarizes its findings, as well as a breakdown of which neighborhoods reported complaints.

Aaaand that's where things got weird, including their finding that 11,155 of 11,373 complaints in the Chicago neighborhood of Norridge (OK, it's technically a village within the city) came from one address. Jalopnik did the math, which means that some angry resident of Norridge made an average of 360 complaints every single day.

If that person chose to fill out ANMS's online form (instead of reporting a complaint by telephone) it would take an unbroken six hours to log them all. Jalopnik's Chris Clarke wrote:

"It can only be assumed that this is the work of a highly deranged individually or a repurposed spam bot."

Last Friday, several residents (and let's guess which ones) testified at Chicago's city noise commission meeting, where many of them complained that they are suffering from insomnia and depression as a result of the constant air traffic. The Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) currently has standards for aircraft noise, based on four stages of loudness with Stage 1 being the loudest and Stage 4 being the quietest. Within the continental United States, civil jet aircraft over 75,000 pounds must be within Stage 2, 3 or 4 By December 2015, all civil jets regardless of weight must be Stage 3 or 4.

The FAA also points out that it cannot "prohibit aircraft overflights of a particular geographic area" unless the route is deemed to be unsafe. So it looks like that person in Norridge might have an extra six hours every day to spend complaining about something else, like the kids that take shortcuts across the lawn or those newfangled horseless carriages. Those are the worst.