Community Fighting to Ban Diesel Trucks

The roar of diesel trucks passing through her Boyle Heights neighborhood forces Margarita Sanchez to yell as she explains how her back injury has kept her out of work for seven months.

The 50-year-old nurse has been spending her days at home near 7th and Soto streets ever since a hospital patient twice her size used Sanchez as a crutch and damaged her spine.

Every community should be so lucky: While recuperating from her September back surgery, Sanchez has taken on the job of healing the neighborhood.

Sanchez has become the backbone of a crusade against the stream of giant trucks lumbering by the homes and schools where she grew up. She and her neighbors want to ban diesel trucks from 7th Street, which is used to reach a northbound onramp for the Golden State Freeway. They are also hoping to speed up construction of freeway sound walls and to reduce noise near their homes and six local schools.

Several area legislators have joined the fight, responding to the community outrage ignited by Sanchez. “It’s difficult to have a normal life when you have diesel trucks queuing up on your block all the time,” said City Councilman Nick Pacheco, who also grew up nearby.

Sanchez and her neighbors have given new voice to resentments still lingering from construction of the mammoth East Los Angeles freeway interchange during the early 1960s, a transportation improvement that many say wrecked the neighborhood. Forty years ago, construction of the Pomona Freeway forced Sanchez and her family to move from their first home.

But even with Sanchez’s efforts, which helped “No Trucks” signs to sprout from modest frontyard gardens, residents here may not get relief quickly. The transportation bureaucracy moves as slowly as rush-hour traffic.

Caltrans, for example, said local freeway sound walls cannot be completed before the winter of 2003. The Boyle Heights sound walls are in line behind 15 other Los Angeles County neighborhoods in even worse shape, state officials said.

Still, said state Sen. Richard Polanco, (D-Los Angeles), “It takes community action to make sure these projects become a reality.”

That ingredient has been scarce in working-class areas like 7th Street. That is, until a burly patient leaned on Sanchez and forced her to stay home from her job at Martin Luther King Jr./Drew Medical Center.

More than 15,000 freeway-bound vehicles drive by her home each day, according to state statistics. By neighborhood estimates, roughly 3,000 are 18-wheelers, garbage trucks and smelly livestock trailers that rumble eastward from Vernon and other industrial areas.

Before staying home, Sanchez said, she paid little heed to the noise and fumes. In that respect, she was no different from most residents of traffic-heavy areas who work elsewhere.

“You come home from work and, yeah, you might hear the trucks and the house smells filthy,” Sanchez said. “But you’ve got to feed the kids, then wash the dishes, then get ready for work again the next day and, by then, you’re tired.”

Sanchez said she had not realized how much noise and danger her four children endured while she worked. Then, last winter, she began walking her 5-year-old daughter Meli home from nearby Soto Street Elementary School.

She noticed how, at the corner of 7th and Soto, the fenced entrance to a pedestrian tunnel is mangled. Truck tire tracks on the sidewalk leading to the entrance show how it happened. A concrete pylon intended to protect the tunnel entrance has been reduced to a heap of rubble.

“This is what kids are dealing with every day?” Sanchez asked herself. Something inside her snapped, and her campaign began.

Thinking of Meli’s chronic bronchitis, Sanchez asked other parents about similar respiratory ailments. Several had children with asthma. Others wondered if traffic fumes could be causing cancer. Everybody complained that their homes shook when trucks passed.

“There is so much filth everywhere,” said Nancy Arias. Her 4-year-old daughter Elizabeth complains that freeway dust settles on her sandwiches while she eats beneath Soto Street Elementary’s outdoor lunch pavilion.

In December, Sanchez circulated a petition demanding improvements and collected the signatures of more than 300 residents.

Neighbor Ezekiel Perez monitored the freeway-bound traffic one afternoon, counting 140 diesel trucks on a residential stretch of 7th Street in one hour. “We have to do everything ourselves,” he said. “They’re not going to do it. They’ve been neglecting us for years.”

Sanchez bombarded lawmakers with copies of the petition and the results of Perez’s informal study, mostly through a fax machine in her home.

Sympathetic Eastside legislators were by then aware of studies linking diesel emissions to cancer and respiratory ailments.

Pacheco is pursuing a city law prohibiting large trucks from using 7th Street. He ultimately aims to restrict freeway-bound commercial trucks to industrial areas of the city.

“It’s a step-by-step process,” Pacheco said, citing area traffic studies underway.

A similar idea was pursued by Richard Alatorre, Pacheco’s predecessor, but there was never enough community support to follow through, former aides said.

“Now that the residents have mobilized, we’re starting to get some answers,” said Elsa Lopez of Madres del Este de Los Angeles-Santa Isabel.

For years, her group and others have been lonely voices for improvements in the community.

“They’ve turned a deaf ear whenever we complained,” Lopez said of government officials.

California Trucking Assn. spokesman Warren Hoemann said traffic studies showing alternative routes are important. But, he noted, a change in routes could affect timely delivery of goods such as clothing, food and gasoline and could hurt business.

Moreover, said Stephanie Williams, an environmental specialist for the association, restricting heavy trucks could result in smaller trucks traveling through the neighborhood, but more of them.

Regardless of the outcome, it is no longer easy to ignore the residents on and around 7th Street.

“They’re making government work and that’s what it’s all about,” said Polanco, who hopes to speed up the scheduled sound wall construction.

Residents want improvements now, saying they are fed up with the grime that kills their flowers and fruit trees.

“They shouldn’t neglect us any longer,” said Delia Lagunas, who, two years ago, saw a state construction truck tumble down a Golden State Freeway embankment next to her home and into her frontyard.

Police told her the slightly injured driver had apparently fallen asleep at the wheel.