Hearing Loss Shows Up Two Decades Early in Harbor Engine Crews
A seven-year Harbor University cohort found the damage starts in a worker’s thirties — and the fix runs into a licensing rule nobody wants to test.
The audiograms were supposed to be a footnote. When Harbor University’s School of Public Health began following 431 waterfront workers in 2019, the study was designed around back injuries and shift-related sleep disruption. Hearing tests went into the protocol because the grant reviewers asked for a broader baseline and because they were cheap to administer.
Seven years later they are the finding.
Among the 118 workers in the cohort who spend more than half their shift in an engine room or machinery space — ferry crews, tug engineers, and the maintenance gangs at the North Pier yard — 38 percent under the age of 40 showed a measurable notch at 4,000 hertz, the narrow-band dip that is the signature of noise-induced damage. In the comparison group of dock and terminal workers of the same ages, the figure was 14 percent.
“That gap is not subtle and it is not a modeling artifact,” said Dr. Ines Marchetti, the occupational medicine physician who directs the cohort. “We are seeing in thirty-four-year-olds what the textbooks describe in fifty-five-year-olds. The exposure is doing exactly what physics says it should do.”
The physics is not in dispute. Sound-level readings taken during the study across eleven vessels found sustained engine-room levels between 96 and 101 A-weighted decibels, with peaks above 110 during startup and reversal. The regulatory action level — the point at which a hearing conservation program becomes mandatory — is 85. Every decibel above that roughly halves the permissible daily exposure, which means a crew standing a six-hour watch at 99 dBA is absorbing something on the order of sixteen times the intended dose.
What is in dispute is what to do about it, and the argument has moved faster than the science.
## The abatement bill
Within three weeks of the preliminary findings circulating, the Port Meridian Ferry System’s board received a $1.4 million abatement proposal covering acoustic panel retrofits on four vessels, replacement of the two loudest ventilation assemblies in the fleet, and the construction of enclosed control stations on the three boats that still require an engineer to stand watch in open machinery space.
The board approved it 5-2 on July 16, with the two dissents coming from members who wanted the item folded into the autumn capital cycle rather than pulled forward. The money comes out of a reserve that had been earmarked for berth improvements at the Cordage terminal, which now slip to 2028.
“We are not going to be the agency that read the study and put it in a drawer,” said board chair Vivienne Sarto. She also acknowledged, without prompting, that the abatement package addresses roughly 60 percent of the fleet’s exposure hours. The remaining 40 percent sits on older hulls where panel retrofits are structurally impractical, and where the honest answer is replacement — a conversation that runs directly into the maintenance funding fight already underway at the statehouse.
Dr. Samuel Ord, the port’s medical officer, said the more durable change is procedural rather than physical. Beginning October 1, the port will require annual audiograms for anyone logging more than 400 hours a year in a designated high-noise space, with the results held by an independent occupational clinic rather than by employers.
The protection and the penalty arrive in the same envelope.
## Why crews are wary
That independence clause exists because of a problem Marchetti’s team did not anticipate and cannot solve with better instruments. Licensed marine engineers must meet a hearing standard to hold their endorsement. An audiogram that documents damage is, in the wrong hands, a document that ends a career.
“You are asking a forty-year-old with two kids and a mortgage to volunteer for the test that might take his ticket,” said Dee Fontaine, business agent for the marine engineers’ local that represents most of the affected crews. “Everybody in that room supports the panels. Not everybody wants the paperwork.”
Fontaine’s local negotiated three provisions before endorsing the screening program: results go to the worker first, a single abnormal result triggers a repeat test rather than a report, and any worker whose hearing declines below the endorsement threshold retains full pay in a shoreside assignment for a minimum of eighteen months while retraining. The port agreed to all three. The union’s own actuary put the shoreside-assignment cost at somewhere between $180,000 and $400,000 a year depending on how many workers the screening actually catches — a range wide enough that Fontaine calls it “an estimate with its hands in its pockets.”
The estimate matters because the port, not the union, pays it.
## A dissent worth hearing
Not everyone in occupational medicine reads the cohort the same way. Dr. Hana Berger, who spent fourteen years as a medical director for a shipping line before joining a regional practice, argues that the study’s design cannot separate current employment from lifetime exposure.
“Marine engineers do not arrive from nowhere,” Berger said. “They come out of naval service, out of shipyards, out of bands, out of hunting cultures, out of ten years of shore trades with worse discipline about protection than any vessel has. If you sample a population that self-selects for noise tolerance, you will find noise damage, and you will attribute all of it to the last job on the résumé.”
Berger does not oppose the abatement — she called panel retrofits “unarguably correct and about fifteen years late.” Her objection is to the screening program’s design. She would rather see baseline audiograms at hire, so the port can measure what it actually causes, than annual audiograms mid-career that mostly document what happened somewhere else.
Marchetti’s response is that the cohort collected occupational histories precisely for this reason, and that restricting the analysis to workers whose entire adult employment was in the ferry and tug fleets narrows the sample to 61 people but leaves the effect intact at 34 percent. She agrees with Berger about baseline testing at hire and has recommended it. The port has not adopted it, citing cost.
The first annual audiograms are scheduled for the week of October 5 at a clinic on Pier Road, in a converted office with a sound booth that arrived on a flatbed in June.
Fontaine has already signed up for the first appointment slot, which he says was a deliberate choice and not a gesture. He is fifty-three, has worked machinery spaces since he was nineteen, and has a fair idea of what the curve will look like.
“If I do not sit in that booth first,” he said, “I cannot ask anybody else to.”
Reporting for this story was prepared for The Harbor Ledger’s health desk. Tips:newsroom@theharborledger.com