During my time in Hanoi, besides chaotic traffic, construction works by neighbors has caused me a lot of troubles. I have been living in different places in Hanoi and anywhere I have moved, I was tortured by noises from a neighbor’s construction.
Just imagine you’re woken up at 5am everyday by the noises of hammers and screw-drivers from next door. You’re suffering from insomnia for weeks and maybe months and it makes you irritated and tired. You aren’t left alone even on the weekend.
And I’m not the only one. My friends have also had to move because they couldn’t put up with the noises from their neighbor’s construction work. People can be stressed by the continuous high volume of noises. We tried to speak louder in vain. Our complaints were ignored or sometimes, our neighbors stopped making noises for a while then resumed their activities again.
Besides noises, what is also making me worried is that house construction and renovation in Hanoi still lack safety standards. Alleys in densely populated area are often very narrow. If anything falls from above, it can harm passers-by. And there’re plenty of things that can fall from houses under construction: tools, bricks, steel bars, robes, mortar buckets, etc.
At the beginning of this year, I stayed at a friend’s house and one morning we suddenly heard a bang. When we ran out, we saw a whole balcony of a building collapsing right in front of an alley. If someone had been around, he or she would even have been killed.
When we looked up, we found the workers at the construction laughing. It was horrifying that they didn’t take such an accident seriously. I wondered if they had gotten used to it.
The question is then “Can things be changed?” In the UK, the law limits construction to certain hours of the day and bans it on Sunday. The law also requires noises to be maintained at an acceptable level. Any violator can be sued and fined. And if a balcony collapses like what happened near my house in Hanoi, the party responsible for the construction will be heavily fined and have its permit revoked.
I’m sure there are safety measures in construction in Vietnam. However, inspection may not be strict enough and these measures have been ignored by some people. As Hanoi will only keep building and innovating, I think we should do something to change the situation. Obviously some silence and safety will please everybody.
Just imagine you’re woken up at 5am everyday by the noises of hammers and screw-drivers from next door. You’re suffering from insomnia for weeks and maybe months and it makes you irritated and tired. You aren’t left alone even on the weekend.
And I’m not the only one. My friends have also had to move because they couldn’t put up with the noises from their neighbor’s construction work. People can be stressed by the continuous high volume of noises. We tried to speak louder in vain. Our complaints were ignored or sometimes, our neighbors stopped making noises for a while then resumed their activities again.
Besides noises, what is also making me worried is that house construction and renovation in Hanoi still lack safety standards. Alleys in densely populated area are often very narrow. If anything falls from above, it can harm passers-by. And there’re plenty of things that can fall from houses under construction: tools, bricks, steel bars, robes, mortar buckets, etc.
At the beginning of this year, I stayed at a friend’s house and one morning we suddenly heard a bang. When we ran out, we saw a whole balcony of a building collapsing right in front of an alley. If someone had been around, he or she would even have been killed.
When we looked up, we found the workers at the construction laughing. It was horrifying that they didn’t take such an accident seriously. I wondered if they had gotten used to it.
The question is then “Can things be changed?” In the UK, the law limits construction to certain hours of the day and bans it on Sunday. The law also requires noises to be maintained at an acceptable level. Any violator can be sued and fined. And if a balcony collapses like what happened near my house in Hanoi, the party responsible for the construction will be heavily fined and have its permit revoked.
I’m sure there are safety measures in construction in Vietnam. However, inspection may not be strict enough and these measures have been ignored by some people. As Hanoi will only keep building and innovating, I think we should do something to change the situation. Obviously some silence and safety will please everybody.
Janak Vadgama (British)
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