Week's Watch

The obvious solution to the noise problem plaguing city and suburban residents is to muffle the noisemakers. Los Angeles officials, however, are doing just the opposite: they are removing the people from the noise. After a series of angry antinoise demonstrations last summer by citizens who live in three middle-and upper-middle-class neighborhoods near Los Angeles International Airport, the city decided the best bet would be to buy up the homes and dispose of them. The cost of getting rid of 1,936 dwellings, some with swimming pools, will be $300 million, making this suburban removal project one of the most costly in U.S. history.

Maine's Environmental Improvement Commission, an agency charged with approving all big developments in the state, last week turned down a proposal for a $150 million oil refinery in Searsport, a small town at the head of Penobscot Bay. After five months of deliberations, the commission concluded that: the refinery would lack the financial and technical ability to meet state air-and water-pollution control standards, the advent of supertankers would mean potential oil spillage, and the new refinery would not "fit harmoniously into the natural environment" of the ruggedly beautiful bay area.

President Nixon last December seized on the 1899 Refuse Act as a way to regulate the discharge of industrial wastes into U.S. waters. The act stipulates that persons and corporations shall not dump wastes into navigable waterways without first obtaining permits. To get permits, they would have to comply with stiff guidelines on dumping which were to be set down by the Environmental Protection Agency. Last week the EPA threw in the sponge; there will be no national guidelines. Instead, said a terse EPA memorandum, regional officials will set their own standards.

Why the change? With as many as 300,000 applications, processing would be impossible to accomplish in any reasonable time. At the core of the problem was the fact that the guidelines for effluent controls bombed out: it was impossible to come up with a standard which would fit every waterway involved.

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