On Monday, October 9, 2017 at 10:40:44 AM UTC-7, Jeff Liebermann wrote:

Probably baloney. You can't hear anyone yelling over the noise of a
big diesel crane motor.

Never been around large motorized operations have you? Though those large scale logging operations mostly used steam cranes. A man's hearing is tuned to hear a man's voice and it's pretty surprising exactly how much noise there can be and you can still hear a man.

Under heavy sail with wind and wave dashing a large sailboat about you can hear men talking in the cockpit from the foredeck.

Around diesel locomotives on the railroad the engineer and fireman can converse almost in a normal tone of voice.

Inside a B52 on take-off with all eight motors on full throttle and no insulating to speak of you could talk to someone 5 feet away.