Five-year quake-shaking campaign: stubborn "noise control" and strenuous confrontation
Intern Chang Zeyu, Chen Canjie, Surging Journalist Ren Wu
The conflict between Room 502 and Room 602 is no longer a secret.
Water leaked upstairs, room 502 used a floor shaker to retaliate.
Other households, including 602, have come to the house, called the police, pulled the phone, complained, petitioned, and even filed a lawsuit in the court, but Room 502 remained closed, and the building was noisy.
On the last day of April, in a residential area in Shanghai’s Pudong New Area, the secret battle for the earthquake finally came to an end.
In the past five years, the lives of most residents in this "Caring Building" have been disturbed by the building shaker.
After the incident aroused widespread media attention, the two sides temporarily truce, and the households who have moved out due to the noise have moved back one after another. The elderly who "have not slept all the year round" also breathed a sigh of relief and said "saved an old life".
The people who shook the building and the people who were shook the building did not want to say more about this, and the two parties involved have suffered more than 4 years. The neighbor’s attitude is also: “There is no noise in the corridor. He has stopped. You don’t want to stop. Asked me."
But the neighbors are also worried that the noise will come back at any time, because the floor shaker is regarded as a counterattack weapon and bargaining power.
However, the conflicts and grievances of the two families who were in the “epicenter” of the noise have not been resolved with the shutdown of the seismic equipment.
Tooth for tooth is sometimes not the best solution to the problem.
In the discussion topic about the floor shaker on the Zhihu platform, more "coming people" summed up their experience and said that it is not recommended or encouraged to use this type of floor shaker. The "violence control" type of retaliation method does not solve it. The problem may even worsen the problem. In the end, both parties need to negotiate and resolve the problem rationally.
"Weird sound" exceeding 60 decibels
At 2 o'clock in the morning on a certain day in April, the old lady in room 702 was woken up again.
This time it was the wooden fish knocking of "Da, Da, Da".
She counted, 10 sounds, 10 less than the previous night.
But the noise did not end there. Following the sound of wooden fish came the harsh and ambiguous sound of radio waves, the sound of people talking... all kinds of mixed sounds poured into her ears, and she felt "The heart is so uncomfortable to die." ".
Compared with Mrs. Wang, whose hearing has been impaired due to ear surgery, her husband, Mr. Zhong, who is already eighty years old, suffers even more from noise.
Due to his sensitive hearing, in the past few years, even if he wears silent earplugs, he has always been unable to sleep normally due to various sounds.
Due to the long-term lack of sleep, Mr. Zhong is always "drowsy" and his body goes from bad to worse.
He even broke his ribs twice: On August 24, 2018, the constant noise made Zhong Lao sleepless all night. He sat in the living room until dawn. When he got up, his head was dizzy, and his waist hit the ground when he passed out. , Resulting in 4 ribs fractured; in May 2019, a similar thing happened again, 1 rib fractured.
The daughter once suggested that they go out to stay in a hotel, but Mrs. Wang was reluctant: "I can't sleep in (hotel), I'm really not used to it."
In fact, it is not only the couple of Mrs. Wang, but many residents of the "Guan Ai Building" are more or less in the category of "noise attack": When the sound sounds, Mrs. Wang puts his hands on the doors and windows of the room, and he can feel it. To the jitter accompanied by the sound; in the days when the noise first appeared, the residents on the second floor once went upstairs to visit Mrs. Wang, who was the leader of the building at the time: “He thought it was an earthquake, because the tea cup on the stool would beat gently.” ; Room 802 and Room 902 simply put the house on the selling website, and the intermediary transfers to others. The 802 residents who have moved out in the fall of 2020 said: "Everyone sells houses because of noise... (if the noise is gone) If you don’t sell it, everyone doesn’t want to sell it.”
According to the previous video report of Xinmin Evening News, a resident on the third floor had to go to his husband’s house to sleep every night for more than a year; the lady in Room 601 said that none of her four bedrooms and two halls could be free from noise. Interference, both the elderly and the children cannot sleep peacefully; another lady whose child is about to take the entrance examination is worried about her child's learning efficiency.
Residents all know that the noise source comes from Room 502 in the same building. Since 2017, neighborhood committees, police stations and other institutions have repeatedly investigated the noise source from house to house. When 502 houses were found, the 502 households could not leave the door, but when the switch was pulled When it broke, the noise stopped abruptly.
The direct "attack target" of 502 households is household 602.
In a report letter, Ms. Wang of 602 resident stated that she had to lay the floor in a slightly noisy living room.
When describing the noise in detail, she said that it was a kind of "sound of rusty gears spinning, toilet bowl, child's heart-piercing crying, knocking wooden fish, etc." alternately broadcasted "extremely penetrating." High decibel low frequency noise".
This is largely consistent with the sound decibel test results presented in a video report of Xinmin Evening News: On April 29, the decibel test software on the phone of a reporter of the newspaper showed that the noise in Room 602 had exceeded 60 decibels.
According to my country's "Acoustic Environmental Quality Standards" and "Social Life Environmental Noise Emission Standards", in areas with residential, cultural and educational functions as the main function, when the noise source is located in a building that needs to be kept quiet, such as a school or a house, the building The noise permissible range of the inner bedroom is: the noise at night (from 22:00 to 6:00 the next day) shall not exceed 30 decibels, and during the day (from 6:00 to 22:00) the noise shall not exceed 40 decibels.
Neighbourhood
When the floor shaker was turned on, the noise spread indiscriminately, and the residents of Room 502, who were the “perpetrators,” were also unable to stay out of the incident.
What's the holiday with Room 602, 502 residents want to retaliate with such a "noise attack" that "harms others and disadvantages themselves"?
As for the cause of the earthquake in the past five years, neighbors say they have limited knowledge.
The old lady in Room 702 believed that the incident was caused by the improper communication between the two parties after the water pipe on the 6th floor leaked in 2016; the residents on the 8th floor heard that there was also "noise on the 6th floor".
According to Mrs. Wang and the residents of 501, Ms. Li in Room 502 and Ms. Wang in Room 602 were good friends for shopping and walking together, and they sometimes took each other's ride to work.
The Paper has contacted both parties several times in this regard, but Ms. Wang in Room 602 and Mr. Yan in Room 502 have chosen to remain silent—Mr. Yan did not respond to the phone calls and text messages sent by The Paper regarding the verification of the matter; Ms. Wang declined to be interviewed on the grounds that she was "under negotiation and would not provoke 502 anymore".
However, in another report written to the Bureau of Letters and Calls on June 19, 2019, Ms. Wang told the story from her own perspective.
At the end of the report, the signatures of 9 households in the same building were left, including Mrs. Wang and households 802 on the 7th floor.
In the report, Ms. Wang attributed the origin of the two conflicts to "the aging of the water pipes in her balcony caused water to the balcony ceiling of Room 502 in October 2016".
According to her statement, after that, the 502 households first blocked the balcony downspout, and refused to negotiate and communicate on the water bleed. Instead, they further blocked the outlet of the domestic water pipe in Room 602.
Therefore, Ms. Wang and Mr. Wang had to ask the property to help dredge the waterway.
However, despite the dredging of the waterway, the communication between the two companies was no longer friendly and smooth, but slowly entered a deadlock-Ms. Wang said in the report that after the water pipe incident, Room 502 had repeatedly visited the door for negotiations.
Not only that, his husband was "beaten" by Yan Li and his wife in Room 502.
This matter was also confirmed by Mrs. Wang, the leader of the building at the time.
On the afternoon of November 9, 2016, Mr. and Mrs. Yan Li in Room 502 and Mr. Wang in Room 602 “meeted on a narrow road” at the elevator entrance on the first floor. The two immediately chased Mr. Wang. The latter hid his head and escaped from the corridor, but the two He did not give up, but attacked the latter again with the wooden sign in the flower bed.
The chaotic fight lasted more than ten minutes, and finally stopped as the surrounding residents gathered and discouraged.
According to Mrs. Wang, the camera outside the building recorded the entire process, and the neighborhood committee members later called the police.
Taking into account the relationship between neighbors, under the persuasion of the neighborhood committee secretary, mediator, and head of the building, Ms. Wang and her husband hope that the neighborhood committee will ask 502 residents to compensate for their physical and mental injuries, clothing costs, and lost work expenses totaling 30,000 yuan. Mediation, the amount was reduced to 20,000.
But 502 households refused to pay.
The Paper subsequently visited the neighborhood committee several times to try to understand the whole story of the conflict and other information about the conflicts between the parties. In this regard, the neighborhood committee stated that the interview must be approved by the neighborhood office, and the neighborhood office staff said that they responded after requesting instructions.
However, as of the press date, the reporter has not received a relevant response.
Mrs. Wang once believed that after 602 no longer pursued the 502 beatings, the contradiction between the two families would end.
However, the direction of the matter was beyond her expectation, and the grievance between the two families grew deeper and deeper.
This is reflected in Ms. Wang's report.
Ms. Wang said that in Room 502, Mr. Yan once blocked people in front of her house, saying that someone knocked on objects and made noise in the room.
But my family was in the United States at the time.
In order to verify that there was no one in the house and did not knock on anything, Ms. Wang had to contact her father to cooperate with the police and the neighborhood committee to open the door for inspection.
She also mentioned that after that, 502 residents installed cameras outside their windows and doors.
The contradiction between the two sides also escalated again, during which there were fierce quarrels and confrontations.
Regarding the situation of the confrontation mentioned by Ms. Wang, the reporter tried to verify with the residents of Room 502, but did not get a reply.
Nothing to do
The other residents of the "Guan Ai Building" have not thought of a solution.
Rather, they tried many ways they could think of, but they still couldn't stop the noise.
According to the old lady of Room 702, direct door-to-door communication, contacting the neighborhood committee and the petition office to assist in mediation and report to the police were the initial methods.
However, the neighborhood committee, household mediation, or police visits failed to knock on the door of 502.
Residents of 501 told The Paper that when the number of police reports is the most, several police officers can come in a day.
But the results are always similar: in the face of the 502 closed doors, the police were unable to forcibly enter the room for inspection and evidence collection.
When the police arrive, the noise is often shut down, and once the police leave, the sound will be heard again.
The Paper Journalists tried to find out the handling of this dispute from the local police station, but failed to get a response.
The old lady of Room 702 said that residents of 602 had also "contained violence with violence", hitting the floor heavily with wood in the middle of the night, making a dull "boom" sound.
But this kind of counterattack often doesn’t last long, because he and other neighbors have disagreements and stop: "In the past few years, he knocked on me and went to him the next day. He is not like the fifth floor. He would open the door and talk to me. Yes. I said what do you want to do? Don’t we all want to sleep in the corridor? Are you going to keep beating like this? I can criticize the sixth floor."
After several rounds, the affected households turned to the court for help.
In 2018, Mrs. Wang went to court with 602 households and 402 households, and was told to go to a designated professional testing department to issue an environmental noise test report, and the testing agency said that the test object must be an organization rather than an individual.
Knowing that the court could not solve the noise problem, Mrs. Wang from Room 702 said that she "conscientiously has lost confidence, so what else can I do?"
After the prosecution was unsuccessful, the residents of Guan'ai Building did not give up calling the police and continued to contact various agencies to intervene in the situation. On the other hand, they also sought other solutions.
On July 4, 2019, all residents of the Guanai Building organized to sign a "Residents Convention" on the handling of noise. The convention prohibits residents from making noise that disturbs the residents, and requires all households to cooperate with the police to carry out investigations when noise occurs. There are 22 households in the entire building. Among them, only 502 households did not sign the convention.
Mrs. Wang also kept an open letter written by Mr. Shen Lao on July 21, 2019 to 502 households in Room 1002, which was also deeply disturbed by the noise.
In that letter, Mr. Shen tried to persuade 502 residents to stop struggling with past entanglements and grievances, but to sit down and participate in communication and mediation to make the "Caring House" worthy of the name.
But the letter is like a stone thrown into the sea, without answer.
After the incident developed, the residents discovered that to get rid of the noise and get a moment of peace in the Guan Ai Building, there was only one feasible way: to turn on the switch.
According to Mrs. Wang, the switch must go through certain procedures: first hit 110, after the police come to find out the situation, then the residents call the property, and the property pulls the electricity.
She said that at their best, they could hit 110 eight times a day.
In her statement, the 9th-floor residents who moved in during the Spring Festival last year had hit 110 and disconnected the switch in Room 502 several times because of his wife’s illness. This drew a little response from the 502 residents—Mr. Yan called the 9th-floor residents. Let him not take care of his own affairs.
"Residual Sound" of the Earthquake
On April 29, 2021, after the incident was reported by the Xinmin Evening News, this “noise attack” derived from the conflicts in the neighborhood attracted the attention of tens of thousands of people.
That night, the frequency and volume of the noise heard by the residents of Guan'ai Building were significantly reduced. The original rapid "Da Da Da Da" changed to a milder "Da-Da-Da-Da".
On the morning of the 30th, all the noise ceased.
Mrs. Wang said that the 502 households seemed to have moved away, and the balcony lights that used to be on at night were not turned on after the news was exposed.
The residents who had moved out to sleep before moved back one after another. Most of them were immersed in the joy of "finally getting a good night's sleep" and "happiness came too suddenly".
Nevertheless, the shadow of the earthquake building has not yet dissipated.
Even though the noise has subsided for more than 20 days, Mrs. Wang is still a little worried, afraid that “the shock will start again” after a long time. She has stated several times that she and other residents do not need any compensation for mental damage. As long as it is quiet, only 502 households are not required. Make noise again.
The Paper asked Mr. Yan and Ms. Wang about the progress of the coordination of the two companies regarding this concern, but Mr. Yan hung up the phone after learning of his intentions, and Ms. Wang said that there was “no result” at present.
Resident committee officials said that the two companies had conducted communication and mediation in late June, but "the specific situation is inconvenient to disclose."
After the incident, discussions about "neighborhood relations" and "shaking the building" were also opened up on a larger scale.
Although it is no longer possible to retrieve related products on the e-commerce platform with the keyword "shaking the building", as long as you change your mind, you can still search with words such as "shaking the building", "upstairs neighbor", and "noise counterattack". To a variety of floor shakers.
The floor shaker is shaped like a mop, and the price is generally around 200 yuan. There are four common related packages: vibration, beat, vibration + beat, vibration + beat + sound.
"Do not hurt the wall, leave no marks" and "Your own voice is small, upstairs is loud" are common business slogans.
The highest-selling floor vibrator was paid by 1000+ people. In the product evaluation, many buyers bought the floor vibrator because of the "noise control" upstairs and repeated communication with no results. Some people called this move. "Take a tooth for a tooth."
But tooth for tooth is sometimes not the best way to solve the problem.
A Zhihu user “Xinxin” who lives in Shaanxi Province described his relationship with the residents upstairs as “confrontation”.
"Stand-off" originated in September 2020, and it has been more than August.
In the meantime, the two sides had a physical conflict on April 5, 2021, the palm of the heart was scratched in the conflict, and her mother was also hospitalized in a stretch.
The cause is still noise.
Being troubled by noises such as children running, pulling furniture, and falling heavy objects that lasted for several hours every night, Xinxin communicated with the residents upstairs many times, but the two sides did not reach an agreement on a solution to the problem.
She and her husband then built a sound-proof ceiling at their own expense, but the ceiling can only isolate the sound and cannot isolate the vibration. The children upstairs still "shook the ground and the mountains" when they ran.
Asking the property and the police for help many times did not help.
Xinxin then began to "counterattack" by broadcasting music at high volume and slamming the ceiling, while the other party further upgraded the "noise control action" in order to retaliate.
On May 3, Xinxinzaizhihu posted a long article about the "see-saw" between herself and the neighbors upstairs. Soon there were more than 100 discussions in the comment area. Some people suggested that she use a floor shaker. Some people say that resonance sound is better.
For fear of "injury to the innocent", Xinxin does not intend to adopt these methods.
But in her opinion: "It's no longer a noise problem anymore. I retaliate against each other. Either she will leave or I will leave, but I will not move away so easily."
Others used "shaking the building" as a bargaining chip to successfully force the noise suppression side to solve the problem.
In the evaluation of products related to floor shakers, there are many expressions such as "the nearest neighbor has finally disappeared", "the effect is good", and "the upstairs is honest".
A Zhihu user named "Qiu Yue", Zai Zhihu, wrote a long article about his successful experience of "resisting violence with violence" and his views on "Shaking the Tower", which won 16,000 approvals.
In 2018, his daughter, who is less than one year old, was awakened several times by the sound of meat chopping upstairs at 6 o'clock in the morning. The multiple visits to the house were fruitless, and the intervention of the police and the property was useless, incurring the intensified noise revenge. .
He had no choice but to purchase a building shaker to conduct a noise "attack" with the other party.
In the end, the other party expressed his willingness to reconcile with him and promised not to make noise again.
However, despite his "victory", Qiu Yue said at the beginning of the long article that he "is not encouraging everyone to use this thing, or even recommending it."
In his view, the floor shaker is not a magical tool, "it is just a bargaining chip that allows both parties to finally sit together and negotiate fairly", "only those who have nothing to do will use it", it does not solve the problem, or even worsen the problem.