The cop on the corner hitched his belt and did his best to guide the balky traffic past some awkward road work. He gestured with a frown, a thumb, a shrug; no choice; it was too loud to shout, and if he had a whistle it was useless. A concrete truck backed up; meep, meep, meep, the sound lost amid the din of hard car horns, the snort of air brakes and the thumping of the big bass boom boxes in the muscle cars.

The cop had been on the corner a while; it looked like he was going to be there a while longer. I said I thought he ought to get some ear plugs. He barked, "What's that?" And I barked back at him, and he must have thought I was a wise guy because he hollered it was none of my goddam business.

It is my business, copper.

It's everyone's business because our taxes pay for all those trips to the ear doctor. Guys don't like to wear ear protection when they work with or near jackhammers, rotary grinders, drills. Guys are tough. Tough guys go deaf. We're all going deaf, I think. There's too much noise in this city, and the louder it gets, the louder we have to shout to make ourselves heard.

I spent some time with Karen Vye the other day. She's a hearing-loss specialist. She used to have a private practice, lending her ear to noisy job sites, testing workers, making recommendations: damp this machine, protect these guys from this noise, etc. Now she works for the Workplace Safety Insurance Board doing more or less the same thing.

Karen is a woman of considerable gravitas. Not surprising: In a former career, she jabbed inoculation needles into the rumps of swimming moose, a task that required her to dangle from a helicopter while skimming the surface of cold lakes in the northern bush. Which is to say she is hard to intimidate. Treats you like an equal. She also looks you in the eye when she talks to you. These are useful skills when your job is to talk to workers about hearing loss.

We took a stroll around town the other day and took sound-measurement levels.

Here's what we found on a relatively quiet afternoon: Front Street across from the Crown Plaza: 74 decibels. In the St. Andrew subway station as a train came in: 80 decibels with a spike of 100 when the brakes squealed. Around the curve to King Station: 82 decibels, with the screaming of the wheels peaking at 88 decibels. I winced. It hurt. According to provincial guidelines, the ideal noise level in Toronto ought to be somewhere around 55 decibels.

The old City of Toronto kinda-sorta followed those guidelines; the new city has yet to come to grips with noise. We are deaf to any talk about damage to our ears. Trouble is, the problem is invisible. We're like the cop. We think we are immune to noise at concerts and hockey games. We think we can take it. We can't. Too much noise for too long does irreversible damage.

When that cop goes deaf -- and he will -- he won't get much help from his hearing aid. You might say to him, "Look, cook, book." He'll hear "ook, ook, ook." And if he cranks up the hearing aid, all he'll hear is "OOK, OOK, OOK."

What I like about Karen's job is that, at the end of the day, she knows she's done good. She once rode around with a Halton ambulance crew; the siren inside the ambulance was 110 decibels. She suggested they move the location of the siren from the top of the ambulance to a place lower down; a simple change, but it saved a few decibels. Good for Halton. Toronto's ambulance and fire departments ought to give Karen a call.

We finished up in the food court at First Canadian Place. The decibel level was 72 at 12:10. Half an hour later, when it was full of office workers chowing down and yapping about their bosses, it reached 82 decibels. We tried to talk. I could barely hear her. My ears hurt by the time we finished. You know how people carp about how rude Toronto is, how pushy we've become, how selfish we are in traffic? Karen says you can pin a lot of that on noise.

It isn't getting any better. And isn't likely to; at the moment, there are two acoustical specialists working for Toronto's Works and Emergency Services; their job is to measure sound over time at particular places in the city, to keep track of the ambient noise levels.

The program is being phased out. They'll lose their jobs next year. That's unacceptable.

I SAID UNACCEPTABLE.

jfiorito@globeandmail.ca