Rerouting the Noise : Construction: Residents near the freeway repair site get relief from the racket.

After residents complained that the noise of late-night pile-driving was, well, driving them crazy, workers repairing the collpased Santa Monica Freeway recently installed large double-layer curtains around the construction site near La Cienega Boulevard.

The 20-foot-high, 450-foot long panels are made of acoustical insulation wrapped in polyvinyl tarp and stretched over a steel frame.

The repair racket was unbearable for some.

“It was nerve-racking at first . . . kind of like a really loud jackhammer,” said Shavonda Calhoun, a bank worker who lives in one of several apartment houses on nearby David Avenue.

Her neighbor Kimberly Fairbanks described it as a “clank-clank-clank” sound. “When you’re sleeping, (it) starts getting kind of loud and it wakes you up, and then it’s hard to go back to sleep,” Fairbanks said. “Actually, this week hasn’t been as loud.”

After the panels were installed, sound meters showed a drop in noise from an average of 84 decibels to levels ranging from 70 to 74 decibels, said Peter J. Shutt, general manager of Bravo Environmental Sound Control Inc., the Bakersfield company that installed the buffers.

The cost of approximately $100,000 for installation and rental of the panels will be paid by the contracting firm C.C. Myers Inc., which began reconstruction of the quake-damaged La Cienega-Venice and Fairfax-Washington freeway crossings on Feb. 5.

In addition to installing the sound wall, the Myers firm has agreed to refrain from pile-driving, its noisiest activity, between 10 p.m. and 6 a.m., said Caltrans spokeswoman Patricia Reid.

In any case, she said, pile-driving will continue for only another week or so, but other construction work will continue 24 hours a day until the job is finished.

Although completion of the $14.9-million project is scheduled for July, incentives for early completion may bring an early end to the discomfort of noise-rattled residents, some of whom live up to half a mile away.

Eula B. Walker, a David Avenue resident, has her own solution. “When it gets too noisy, I put my earplugs in,” she said. “I’m learning to deal with it.”