Rumford, Maine, Residents Up All Night Due to Ridiculously Loud Sound

Rumford, Maine, is normally a pretty quiet town.

They have the soft hum of the local paper mill in the background, but there’s something very loud and mysterious being heard throughout the city.

It’s suddenly feeling like the set of a low-budget horror movie.

Residents are being jolted awake by a loud noise that seems to come and go at will, according to WGME.

No, it's not aliens, or the ghost of an old lumberjack but, that’d be cool. No, the answer is pretty boring, but for those of us who are curious, it's the mill's steam motor that's giving the locals an annoying night.

The noise, according to residents sounds "ridiculously loud" that’s anything but subtle.

Mary, a local tired of the nightly noise, told WGME, "It was a ridiculously loud and high-pitched screech."

Another resident told the news station, "You can hear it all over town, It's all night long.”

The head of environmental compliance at ND Paper said the noise is from a "steam imbalance," which led the mill to vent steam almost non-stop, according to WGME.

This venting, along with restarting the mill's turbine engine, made the loud sounds heard all around town.

The town's noise ordinances don’t apply to industrial sites like the paper mill, but after 3 full nights of this relentless sound, some folks think that should change, according to WGME.

What do you think? Should industrial sites have noise ordinances?