The newest runway at O’Hare Airport has generated more noise complaints than ever. However, a good portion of the complaints come from a small number of people.

She now ranks among the area’s most prolific complainers and is one of 11 people responsible for 44 percent of the noise complaints leveled in August, according to the city’s Department of Aviation.

The city, which operates the airport, pokes at her serial reporting in its monthly report by isolating the number of complaints from a single address in various towns. It’s a move meant to downplay the significant surge in noise complaints since the airport’s fourth east-west runway opened last fall, but it only seems to energize Morong…

Chicago tallied 138,106 complaints during the first eight months of the year, according to the Department of Aviation. That figure surpassed the total number of noise complaints from 2007 to 2013.

The city, however, literally puts an asterisk next to this year’s numbers in monthly reports and notes that a few addresses are responsible for thousands of complaints. The August report, for example, states that 11 addresses were responsible for more than 13,000 complaints during that 31-day period…

But even excluding the serial reporters, the city still logged about 16,000 complaints in August, about eight times the number it received in August 2013.

There are two trends going on here:

1. The overall number of complaints is still up, even without the more serial complainers. This could mean several things: there are more people now affected by noise, a wider range of people are complaining, and/or this system of filing complaints online has caught on.

2. A lot of the complaints are generated by outliers, including the main woman in the story who peaked one day at 600 complaints. It is interesting that the City of Chicago has taken to pointing this out, probably in an attempt to

This is not an easy issue to solve. The runway issues and O’Hare’s path to being the world’s busiest airport again mean that there is more flight traffic and more noise. This is not desirable for some residents who feel like they are not heard. Yet, it is probably good for the whole region as Chicago tries to build on its transportation advantages. What might the residents accept as “being heard”? Changing whole traffic patterns or efforts at limiting the sound? Balancing local and regional interests is often very difficult but I don’t see how this is going to get much better for the residents.