Here's a story that's making a lot of local news in northeast Wisconsin today. Not sure what the noises are, could be related to the crazy warm weather, take your best guess. Here's the story from the Appleton Post Crescent.
Clintonville explosions rattle Wisconsin city for second night
CLINTONVILLE — The city’s staff and residents are exhausted.
Not only did they spend Tuesday checking off an extensive list of potential causes for their mystery late-night booming noise, they did so on little sleep since the noise persisted a second night.
The booms that woke the northeast neighborhood Sunday night came back Monday night into Tuesday. Police say they received nearly 100 calls throughout the night about the loud explosion sounds that shake the ground.
Residents in the 4,600-person town 45 miles northwest of Appleton called at 12:15 a.m., 1:20 a.m., 2:20 a.m. and again at 5:10 a.m. Tuesday.
“We spent the day reviewing our water system again, rechecking gas levels, checking our landfill, dams, local industries and geologists,” said City Administrator Lisa Kuss.
Kuss and a plethora of experts involved still don’t know what’s causing the noise.
Kuss said possible explanations have ranged from the easily explained, like natural gas and water utilities, to the more obscure.
Some suggest the noise could be isostatic rebounding where glacial ice shifts cause noise. Others pin the booms on cryoseism — frost quakes where thawing soil or rock suddenly expand or contract.
Whatever the cause, Clintonville plans to capture some evidence. Authorities set up audio and video equipment at a utility facility on the northeast side Tuesday night.
Engineering firms from Milwaukee also offered up seismic monitoring equipment to city officials Tuesday.
Chuck DeMets, a geoscience professor at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, said the best way to determine the source of the shaking is to set up four seismometers around the city.
A seismic station set up near Shiocton, an Outagamie County village located midway between Clintonville and Appleton, recorded unusual ground shaking activity this week.
Clintonville isn’t the only place to experience the phenomenon.
City officials in the Canadian city of Windsor, Ontario, just across the bridge from Detroit, have battled the “Windsor hum” for nearly a year.
Al Maghnieh, a Windsor councilor, told The Post-Crescent on Tuesday a similar banging and humming noise can be heard in a portion of the city, which has 200,000 residents.
“The federal government in Canada along with the province did a thorough investigation with seismic monitoring and narrowed the source down to a 1 km radius near Zug Island in Michigan,” Maghnieh said.
The island is home to a steel mill, which denies making the noise. Between March and November last year the federal government received more than 400 complaints of the noise.
Maghnieh says the low frequency hum is accompanied by an infrequent jackhammer or series of bangs.
When do they hear it the most? At night when it’s most quiet.
The city has run into international political opposition since the island is U.S. soil and would cost U.S. money to investigate and remedy, Maghnieh said.
In Clintonville, a Milwaukee company, Walker Forge, operates a steel forge less than a mile from the reports of noise. But company president Richard Recktenwald, who is based in Clintonville, was emphatic that the forge is not the source of the sounds and vibrations.
“We don’t run board hammers at night, and the board hammers themselves are of such a small version that while they make noise, they don’t send vibration through the ground,” Recktenwald said. “It is also extremely low frequency vibration … (and) they don’t introduce energy into the floor.”
“We’re operating in the same manner we have for a decade.”
The city has scheduled a public meeting at 6 p.m. today March 21 at the Clintonville High School Auditorium to allow for questions of city officials.
Clintonville explosions rattle Wisconsin city for second night
CLINTONVILLE — The city’s staff and residents are exhausted.
Not only did they spend Tuesday checking off an extensive list of potential causes for their mystery late-night booming noise, they did so on little sleep since the noise persisted a second night.
The booms that woke the northeast neighborhood Sunday night came back Monday night into Tuesday. Police say they received nearly 100 calls throughout the night about the loud explosion sounds that shake the ground.
Residents in the 4,600-person town 45 miles northwest of Appleton called at 12:15 a.m., 1:20 a.m., 2:20 a.m. and again at 5:10 a.m. Tuesday.
“We spent the day reviewing our water system again, rechecking gas levels, checking our landfill, dams, local industries and geologists,” said City Administrator Lisa Kuss.
Kuss and a plethora of experts involved still don’t know what’s causing the noise.
Kuss said possible explanations have ranged from the easily explained, like natural gas and water utilities, to the more obscure.
Some suggest the noise could be isostatic rebounding where glacial ice shifts cause noise. Others pin the booms on cryoseism — frost quakes where thawing soil or rock suddenly expand or contract.
Whatever the cause, Clintonville plans to capture some evidence. Authorities set up audio and video equipment at a utility facility on the northeast side Tuesday night.
Engineering firms from Milwaukee also offered up seismic monitoring equipment to city officials Tuesday.
Chuck DeMets, a geoscience professor at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, said the best way to determine the source of the shaking is to set up four seismometers around the city.
A seismic station set up near Shiocton, an Outagamie County village located midway between Clintonville and Appleton, recorded unusual ground shaking activity this week.
Clintonville isn’t the only place to experience the phenomenon.
City officials in the Canadian city of Windsor, Ontario, just across the bridge from Detroit, have battled the “Windsor hum” for nearly a year.
Al Maghnieh, a Windsor councilor, told The Post-Crescent on Tuesday a similar banging and humming noise can be heard in a portion of the city, which has 200,000 residents.
“The federal government in Canada along with the province did a thorough investigation with seismic monitoring and narrowed the source down to a 1 km radius near Zug Island in Michigan,” Maghnieh said.
The island is home to a steel mill, which denies making the noise. Between March and November last year the federal government received more than 400 complaints of the noise.
Maghnieh says the low frequency hum is accompanied by an infrequent jackhammer or series of bangs.
When do they hear it the most? At night when it’s most quiet.
The city has run into international political opposition since the island is U.S. soil and would cost U.S. money to investigate and remedy, Maghnieh said.
In Clintonville, a Milwaukee company, Walker Forge, operates a steel forge less than a mile from the reports of noise. But company president Richard Recktenwald, who is based in Clintonville, was emphatic that the forge is not the source of the sounds and vibrations.
“We don’t run board hammers at night, and the board hammers themselves are of such a small version that while they make noise, they don’t send vibration through the ground,” Recktenwald said. “It is also extremely low frequency vibration … (and) they don’t introduce energy into the floor.”
“We’re operating in the same manner we have for a decade.”
The city has scheduled a public meeting at 6 p.m. today March 21 at the Clintonville High School Auditorium to allow for questions of city officials.
