GRANADA HILLS : 24-Hour Repair Project Trying Their Patience

The six mentally retarded adults at the Granada Hills guest home rise again and again in the middle of the night with the same complaint.

“I can’t sleep because of that noise,” they tell care provider Wilma Tamayo.

That noise is the oh-so-dissonant song of reconstruction, punctuated by the incessant thumping of pylons and the chest-rattling roar of earthmovers.

It is the sound of workers hurrying to raise the fallen Simi Valley Freeway, toppled by the Northridge earthquake. And it is a sound that closed windows and 20-foot-high plywood sound walls can’t keep out of the 3 L Guest Home.

“Twenty-four hours (a day),” said neighbor Rodolfo Puno, who lives around the corner from where the overpass plunged into the intersection of San Fernando Mission Boulevard and Gothic Street in the early hours of Jan. 17.

As if raising the freeway--a project due to be completed by late September--weren’t concern enough, Caltrans and San Diego-based contractor FCI find themselves with an additional task: trying to make the massive undertaking as painless as possible for the dozens of nearby residents, many of whom are still dealing with quake damage to their own homes.

“We want to be good neighbors,” said Caltrans spokeswoman Margie Tiritilli. “We have held regular community meetings to try and address the concerns. It’s just an unfortunate circumstance.”

Neighbors agree, and most are understanding of the inconveniences and liberal in their praise for workers, many of whom are working long hours to get the job done on time. But the inconveniences are hard to ignore, they say.

Not only is there the constant and considerable noise, but streets are closed off, forcing residents to take longer, alternative routes. There is unending truck traffic, the lack of privacy.

And there is the dust.

“We have to keep the windows closed,” said Puno as he stood recently under the sound wall looming over his back yard. He can’t leave his laundry on the line for long, he added, without it taking a good dusting.

Mary Baker lives about five houses away from the main construction site and said that after a restless night’s sleep she often wakes to begin serious house cleaning.

“We can’t seem to get the dust off anything.”

Optometrist Jerome Splan, whose office is about a block away on San Fernando Mission Boulevard, keeps dust covers over his medical instruments.

Workers have erected the enormous plywood walls to guard the nearest homes at a cost of $500,000, Tratelli said. A water truck sprays out thousands of gallons a day in an attempt to keep the dust down, and then a street sweeper comes along to clean up the mess.

But as concrete rubble is crushed to be reused in the new freeway and tons of fill dirt are moved about, some dust is inevitable. And the noise from such an operation cannot be muted completely.

Caltrans has offered to temporarily move many of the residents nearest the reconstruction into hotels or apartments away from the work. Some have taken the agency up on the offer, Tiritilli said, with the state paying out about $45,000 for 560 hotel room nights so far.

But most have chosen to stay and make the best of it, they said, washing cars more often, sleeping with earplugs.

“It could have been a lot worse,” said neighbor Baker. “At least I wasn’t under the freeway when it fell . . . and neither was anyone else.”

Even a tersely worded, handwritten sign asking construction workers to not park in front of one house ends with a friendly greeting, and apparent appreciation for their grueling hours.

“Good night/Good morning,” it reads.