ON THE EDGE : Noise, Pollution and Accidents Make Living Next to a Freeway an Irritating, Scary Experience

It’s bad enough, says Lynn Hansen, to be forced to live with the noise, the day-in-day-out whine of rubber hitting asphalt, the roar of engines and the grinding of gears just a few yards beyond her back fence.

But what’s really irritating, she says, is when cars break down or run off the side of road and the people climb over her fence, through her backyard and up to her house to use the telephone.

“One accident happened right behind us. These guys were drunk, lost control of the car, and they climbed over our fence and asked to use the telephone. These were all four great big guys, in the middle of the night,” said Hansen, a resident of Cascade Lane in Huntington Beach who has had the San Diego Freeway as a backyard neighbor for almost 20 years.

“We get all kinds of things happening back there, cars on fire, you name it,” Hansen said. “I see at least three (bad accidents) a year, and I’m gone all day.”

Welcome to life next to the freeway. For those residents who live next to such Orange County main streets as the Santa Ana, San Diego and San Gabriel River freeways, it is not life in idyllic suburbia.

Living next to the freeway, they say, means never inviting people over for backyard barbecues. It means putting up with pollution that often kills outdoor plants, and repeatedly washing a film of oil and dust off lawn furniture and windows. It means often not being able to tell the difference between a small earthquake rocking Southern California and a heavy truck hitting a bump on the freeway a few yards away. It probably means getting several thousand dollars less for their homes when they try to sell. And always, always it means noise.

Occasionally, it means living on the edge of disaster.

About 20 years ago, Pete and Mary Bonasso watched with dismay as construction workers paved the San Diego Freeway and the Springdale Street off-ramp just 15 feet away from the backyard of their Westminster home.

Two weeks ago, they watched in terror as a fireball exploded next to their property when a 8,000-gallon gasoline tanker truck jackknifed and its fuel ignited. The Bonassos’ 25-year-old Abraham Avenue home was threatened, its backyard foliage scorched and a rear-facing window cracked from the intense heat.

“I didn’t think they’d save my house. I thought it was going,” said Pete Bonasso, 62. “When I saw the fire and heard the explosion, it was like I was back in the Second World War. It was like the flames in the bunkers.”

A neighbor--whose house was so close to the tanker blaze that firefighters used his backyard to feed water hoses to the scene--recalled that several years ago a large truck lost a tire on the freeway and a gigantic chunk of heavy rubber suddenly bounded into the backyard where his small children were playing.

“They were too scared to play out there again for a long time,” said Richard Butcher, 38.

Many along the freeway’s edges tell stories of cars plowing down embankments and coming to rest nudged against backyard fences.

Others tell of security problems.

Marc Antoni, who bought his Rossmoor home before the San Gabriel River (605) Freeway was built 20 feet from his back door, recalled that several years ago his house was broken into. Thieves had pushed his backyard table up against his fence, apparently to get the loot up to their getaway car, he said.

Burglary Problems

“There is a problem with burglaries. People park on the freeway, burglarize houses and then jump back over the wall. There’s no way can you catch them that way,” said Gus Birckman, vice president of the Rossmoor Homeowners Assn.

Other times, Antoni said, drivers have run out of gas, hopped the fence and wandered through his and neighbors’ backyards, looking for a telephone.

“You don’t open the door and ask what they want,” he said. “They may be people who want to use the phone. They may be people who want to knock you on the head and rob you.”

It’s cars, not people, that intrude on Maria Gutierrez’s property on Eastside Avenue in Santa Ana, just a few yards away from the Santa Ana Freeway.

“For me, the noise doesn’t bother me at all,” she said. “The only thing I don’t like is when the cars fall from the freeway.” She has seen about a dozen cars run off the road and into her yard in the last nine years, destroying trees, roses and other plants.

Those aren’t the only drawbacks to life along the freeways.

According to the Southern California Air Quality Management District, carbon monoxide levels are generally higher next to the freeway during rush-hour or stop-and-go traffic. During steady traffic, nitrogen dioxide levels are higher “and there are a lot more particulates, the dust and other stuff that’s coming out of the tailpipes,” said spokesman Ron Ketcham.

Several years ago, a state Department of Health Services study showed that children in Los Angeles schools near freeways performed worse in reading and math than children attending schools in quieter neighborhoods. There have been no subsequent studies since that report, based on data collected in 1979, “but inasmuch as freeway noise has not changed much, I would say the results are still pretty much what you’d find today,” said Russ Dupree, health department noise control engineer.

Chief Complaint

Clearly, noise is the chief complaint of people living next to freeways.

“I hate it,” John McCarthy, 55, shouted from his front step, over the din of the Santa Ana Freeway, just 20 feet away.

“It’s lousy,” said Mary Bonasso of the San Diego Freeway traffic just on the other side of her backyard fence. “When you’re sitting back there, you have to raise your voice to be heard.” People tell her that she and her husband speak loudly. “We have to talk loud, and our TV is on loud, too. It has to be in order to hear it,” she said.

“In the 13 years we’ve lived here, I know the traffic must have doubled, if not tripled,” said Lorrayne Salvin, whose house on Vermont Street in a fashionable section of Westminster backs up to the San Diego Freeway. “When we bought the house, the freeway did not connect with I-5 (the Santa Ana Freeway, which links up with the San Diego Freeway near Irvine), and now people can speed through here, straight to the border.”

In Antoni’s Rossmoor home, tighter-fitting French windows were just installed to cut down on the noise and vibration, which was felt and heard whenever a truck changed lanes and ran over the raised lane dots.

“But open the windows, and it’s like being in the middle of the freeway,” Antoni said.

Sound Walls Sought

Sound walls, everyone agreed, are the answer. But there’s much more to getting a sound wall from the Department of Transportation than merely erecting a slab of concrete.

Residents of Rossmoor have been fighting for nearly 30 years to get one put in between them and the San Gabriel River Freeway. The Bonassos say they’ve been trying to get a wall for nearly that long. Residents along Vermont Street in Westminster and Cascade Street in Huntington Beach likewise want noise protection.

To qualify for a sound wall from Caltrans, a neighborhood must be placed on a priority list. To rank high, the homes must have been built before the freeway was installed, the noise level has to be higher than 70 decibels during more than 10% of the day, and the wall must be cost-effective, or roughly no more than $25,000 per residence, said Satish Chander, a senior transportation engineer with Caltrans.

A sound wall costs roughly $1 million per mile to install, including the relocation of utilities and landscaping, he said.

200 Projects

There are about 200 projects on the state’s sound-wall list right now, with a little more than half of them in Orange, Los Angeles and Ventura counties, he said. If they were all to be built, the price tag would be about $200 million, he said.

So only the very top of the list gets done each year. During the next five years, the state plans to spend $18.6 million on sound-wall construction, he said.

The Caltrans priority system rankles the homeowners of Rossmoor, which consistently ranks near the bottom of the state list, residents say. Yet it isn’t fair, for when people bought homes there, they were assured by the developer that the freeway would be “a good distance” away, said homeowners’ association spokesman Birckman. Antoni said he was told the freeway would be 150 yards away. But Birckman said homeowners apparently were shown the wrong map and that Caltrans ranks them low because the state contends the route was known when the homes were sold.

Rossmoor homeowners have lobbied elected officials and sent representatives to Sacramento, “all to no avail,” he said. Now they are contemplating whether to establish an assessment district that would obtain funds for the estimated $1.2-million wall and bill homeowners over a number of years.

The Orange County Transportation Commission is looking toward another financial solution to communities that are years away from getting their sound walls under Caltrans’ program. The commission is sponsoring a bill, carried by Assemblywoman Doris Allen (R-Cypress), that would establish a Soundwall and Landscaping Service Authority, or SALSA. If passed, it would allow counties--after they get the approval of their supervisors and a majority of their cities--to tack a couple of dollars onto residents’ vehicle registration fees to establish a fund solely for sound walls and freeway improvements in their communities. The same mechanism is now used to finance freeway emergency call boxes, he said.

Included in Project

There is another way to circumvent the Caltrans sound-wall priority list, officials said. If a freeway is scheduled to be widened and improved, the cost of a sound wall can be included in that project. This is good news for the Bonassos because they live along a stretch of the San Diego Freeway that, according to Caltrans, is scheduled to get widened--and soundproofed--beginning next year.

Houses next to freeways generally have depressed property values, homeowners complained. In Rossmoor--where it is unusual for a house to sell for under $200,000--homes next to the freeway usually sell for about $20,000 less than those a few blocks away, some homeowners said. In other neighborhoods, the price might be marked down by a few thousand dollars.

While that may sound like bad news for sellers, that can be good news for buyers, said one real estate agent.

“Sometimes freeway houses provide an opportunity to move into a neighborhood a buyer couldn’t otherwise afford,” said Phyllis Spivey of Spivey Associates in Tustin.

However, for those owning houses next to the Santa Ana Freeway, which will be widened through the Santa Ana area in the next few years, the freeway has been a “cloud over their heads,” Spivey said. The expansion project will require the elimination of many houses and other buildings along the stretch, but the state so far has not moved to purchase any of the properties, she said. With their property’s future uncertain, many homeowners who need to move cannot find buyers, she said.

Prisoners in Their Homes

“Those people are almost prisoners in their homes. They don’t know what to tell the buyers,” Spivey said. One couple she knows of needs to relocate to Missouri, she said, “but their property is just not marketable.”

But on Spurgeon Street in Santa Ana, Jeff Isbell, 25, is content with the plans for the bustling Santa Ana Freeway, located just 20 feet and a chain-link fence away from his front yard. He and his growing family moved into the beige concrete block house about Christmastime, knowing full well the expansion project will move them out soon. But he was able to get the house for a “good price” from a Marine who had to move out, and Isbell is hoping to turn a bit of a profit when the state comes around to buy the property.

He and his wife both work in Orange County, but the only other area they would have been able to afford was Corona or Riverside, he said. By moving next to the freeway, they’re able to spend less time traveling on it, he said.

“You either hear it or be on it,” he said. “Everyone’s a freeway slave.”