An Alarming Racket

A neighborhood driven to distraction by a noisy burglar alarm in an unoccupied house was rescued Wednesday night by a police inspiration: Call the alarm a party.

The very loud alarm had been whooping its little heart out for 70 hours in the 20100 block of Hatteras Street.

Some neighbors said they were starting to go nuts. Sue Greenfield said the noise “was scrambling my brain.”

Gary Larson said he could hear the alarm from every room in his house.

Los Angeles City Councilwoman Laura Chick’s office received 15 complaints, and Los Angeles police logged even more.

“We received 15 phone calls from [residents] who rightfully believe that 60 hours of alarms going off is unreasonable,” said Eric Rose, an aide to Chick. “This is clearly more than any reasonable person can put up with.”

The West Valley LAPD station got calls from “a lot of very, very upset people,” said Sgt. Dan Mastro. One woman was crying, another threatened to blow up the alarm if nothing was done, he said.

Police feared neighbors would start taking matters into their own hands.

One man was spotted trying to disassemble the alarm. But when the man realized he had been noticed, he fled, police said.

“I feel for them. If it was my neighborhood I wouldn’t want anything going off for 64 hours either,” he said.

But officers said because the alarm was on private property, they felt they had no legal right to remove it no matter how annoying it was. They tried to track down the owners, finally locating an address in Oregon, and left messages on an answering machine.

For three days, police came by, made sure there hadn’t been a burglary and logged the alarm as false. Finally police came up with a legal inspiration.

Just call the alarm a party.

In cases of loud parties in the city, officers respond and ask the occupants to turn down the noise. If the noise continues, police have the legal authority to remove whatever equipment is causing the disturbance. Apparently, the law does not require that there actually be guests at the party.

Neighbor Jeff Greenfield signed a police report as a victim of the “noisy party” disturbance, giving police grounds to shut down the “festivities” at the empty house.

Police called in firefighters, who mounted a ladder and simply cut the wires on the outside alarm. “Oh! It’s quiet!,” Greenfield said when the noise finally stopped.

The owners of the house, Vincent and Marianne Golding, were reached late Wednesday night in Oregon and informed they will be cited for disturbing the peace and operating an alarm not permitted by the Police Commission, both misdemeanors, Mastro said.

Chick will bring the matter to the city attorney’s office to determine whether legislation is needed to deal with any such future problem, Rose said.

Marianne Golding, interviewed by telephone at her new home in Ashland, Ore., said neither she nor her husband knew how the alarm was triggered, nor that it had been going off for so long. Had they known, she would have mailed the keys to the neighbors, she said. She and her husband plan to sell the Woodland Hills house. They never used the alarm when they lived there, she said, adding that it sometimes would go off because of power outages.

She said she has always considered the alarm “a big pain in the neck.”