ANAHEIM : Traffic Noise Drives Residents to the Wall

As a group of homeowners gathered in a neighbor’s yard recently to complain about their common problem, it roared through their conversation from the freeway nearby.

The problem is unrelenting noise for these Romneya Avenue residents, many of whom bought their homes when the Riverside Freeway was just a street and the Orange Freeway interchange just one block away wasn’t yet built.

But for the past two decades, as the hordes of commuters have grown, these neighbors increasingly have sought something to reduce what they call the unbearable roar.

“Earthquakes don’t even bother me anymore because I can’t tell the difference between them and the trucks going by,” said June Simpson, a 31-year resident, whose back-yard fence sits on the freeway shoulder.

“It used to be,” recalled 15-year resident Jack Grace, that commuter noise would “start at 6 o’clock in the morning; now it starts at 4 and doesn’t let up all day long.”

In the early 1970s, a group of residents started talking to county transportation officials about building a sound wall and collected signatures on petitions in the neighborhood in support of the idea. But nothing came of that effort, and residents again are starting to lobby for a sound wall.

Bob Lowe, organizer of the informal neighborhood group, proudly produced copies of letters from former state Sen. John Seymour, Assemblyman Ross Johnson and Mayor Fred Hunter, who all, in recent weeks, have lobbied the Orange County Transportation Commission to build the proposed wall between Sunkist Way and Placentia Avenue.

At one point last June, the commission awarded the design contract and estimated that construction would begin this spring. Those plans were stalled, however, by the passage of Measure M and plans to improve the Riverside Freeway with car-pool lanes, said Cymantha Atkinson, an assistant analyst for the commission.

The commission is scheduled to vote Monday on funding for various sound-wall projects, including the wall for Romneya Avenue residents. But Atkinson said the staff is reluctant to commission a wall, at a cost of $900,000, that might be demolished during freeway improvements.

“We are trying our darndest to work with the neighborhood,” Atkinson said. The question, she noted, is not if, but when the wall will be constructed.

The staff will recommend that the wall be built in conjunction with the freeway improvements, at the start of construction in March, 1993, she said.

Meanwhile, Romneya Avenue residents are fearful of accepting that date.

“We’ve been promised this thing for the past 15 years,” Lowe said, “and it just keeps getting worse and worse and worse.”