The Rumbles are back.
Some say they never really abated.
Around Victoria, people have reported hearing this mysterious low rumbling noise this week. It sounds like distant thunder, or a heavy truck trundling past, or God bowling — just as it has, on and off, for five years.
No one can say with certainty where the Rumbles come from. Some sources are more likely than others, though, the most oft-cited one being U.S. navy fighter jets flying out of the base at Whidbey Island in Washington.
“It’s just been crazy this week,” says Victoria McGroarty, who heard the Rumbles in the Arbutus Road area of Gordon Head. Tuesday evening was particularly intense. “It went until 11 at night.”
Kristia Di Gregorio heard it in the Quadra-Hillside area that evening. “At first, I assumed it was construction noise going late into the evening.”
She said it had the low register of an earthquake, only without the shaking — disconcerting, given last week’s 6.6-magnitude temblor up-Island. Other Victorians feared an earthquake, too (though those of a certain generation assumed a flashback from the brown acid at Woodstock, so put on some Allman Brothers and rode it out). Younger Victorians fired off tongue-in-cheek tweets linking the rumbling to rapper Bun B, he of the excessive bass, who played Club 9one9 on Tuesday night.
This all dates back to 2009, when Victorians — particularly those in Oak Bay and the east side of the Saanich Peninsula — spent late summer and autumn guessing at the source of the puzzling noise, which would persist for up to 30 seconds at a time.
Some blamed nuclear submarines, or a massive shift of undersea sands, or naval gunnery exercises, or aliens. Someone mentioned a “whistler” — a phenomenon in which energy from a thunderstorm can travel from hemisphere to hemisphere through magnetic-field lines and create a sound. Lately the word “fracking” has entered the conversation.
The Royal Canadian Navy says it isn’t up to anything this week that would cause such a noise. Seismologist Garry Rogers says no earthquakes were recorded by Sidney’s Pacific Geoscience Centre at the times in question.
A more likely source is the Whidbey Island Naval Air Station, where EA-18G Growler jet fighters began arriving to replace the older Prowlers not long before the Rumbles began. The base is where pilots learn to fly the planes off aircraft carriers. Top Gun stuff.
They sometimes fly over the San Juan Islands, and sometimes do so at night, which would fit with Victoria’s experience.
“It could be from here,” says Mike Welding, the base’s public affairs officer.
On the other hand, it might be from somewhere else. The only way to know for sure is to see if the Rumbles coincide with base operations. Welding says Victorians can email their experiences — describing exactly what they heard, and precisely when — to comments.naswi@navy.mil.
There may, in fact, be more than one source for the Rumbles. Previous episodes, including a March 2012 series of rolling thunderclaps whose vibrations were strong enough to topple an old barn near Sooke, have been tied to the use of explosives in high-tech welding on the Olympic Peninsula. Seems odd, but sound waves can behave oddly under the right atmospheric conditions.
“We never did get an official explanation,” says Sharon Hanslip, the Otter Point woman whose barn collapsed that day.
Hanslip says the mysterious sounds never did let up, at least not for long.
“We felt several in the past month or two. There have been several loud explosions that haven’t been explained.
“We had one yesterday, not an explosion but a rumble,” she said Thursday.
And as long as we have more rumbles than West Side Story, it would be nice to know the source.
