Neighbors Sound Off on Anaheim Wall

If Yorba Linda wanted to remake the gateway of its city in the image of “Blade Runner,” transforming part of its border with Anaheim into what could become a graffiti-strewn gulag, local officials say they would be hard pressed to beat the $12.5-million plan their neighbor to the south has cooked up.

Usually, area homeowners are grateful for a sound wall. But this is no ordinary sound wall. It’s a towering metal wall along 2 1/2 miles of federal land that separates the cities. Its purpose is to muffle the noise from locomotives that rumble by about 70 times a day--and that number could almost double by the end of the decade.

While Anaheim residents are delighted by the plan, homeowners perched on a small hill on the other side of the tracks, in Yorba Linda, say their view of the valley and mountains would be spoiled by honeycombed steel.

Anaheim spent years designing the sound wall with no objections from Yorba Linda. But when Yorba Linda officials got a look at some artist sketches recently and saw that the thing would be more than 40 feet high in places, they said not just “No” but “No way, no how.” They filed a lawsuit to stop Anaheim from beginning work on the wall next month.

“Anaheim has to be about one of the rudest neighbors you can ask for,” said Yorba Linda Councilman John M. Gullixson. “This plan is the result of complete incompetence. It is absolutely idiotic. The noise is going to bounce right off that wall and back into Yorba Linda twice as loud.”

Such rhetoric has trackside residents in Anaheim steamed.

They have been fighting to get the wall built for nearly 10 years. Congress finally heard their pleas in 1996 and gave the city $12 million. That was the time for Yorba Linda to step in with its concerns, residents and Anaheim officials say. Not now.

“Now that we are ready to go, they all of a sudden want the plans changed?” said Glenda Bridges, a 25-year resident of Northfield Avenue, which runs alongside the tracks. “No way. They can’t just stay completely uninvolved and then jump in at the last minute.”

Wall proponents say Yorba Linda snubbed regular invitations to join in planning the project. “We even built a section of the wall in the Edison Field parking lot to run tests and they were invited,” said Larry Newberry, Anaheim assistant city attorney.

Those tests concluded that the wall would absorb the sound and not deflect it into Yorba Linda, according to environmental reports filed by Anaheim. “They were consulted all along,” Newberry said.

Anaheim has set aside funds to keep the wall graffiti-free, he said.

Yorba Linda’s suit now threatens the project. Anaheim officials say if they don’t move forward with construction next year, they could lose their federal funding.

Meanwhile, the tiny tin and wood units in Anaheim’s Friendly Village mobile home park shake day and night as the freight trains rumble by. Owners of the single-family houses around Northfield Avenue say vibrations from the locomotives have shaken nails loose from their walls.

Anaheim sound consultants concluded that the volume for trackside residents is the equivalent of standing three feet from a shouting person. When many of the residents moved in a generation ago, only about 15 trains came by a day. Two more tracks have been built since then. By 2010, there will be more than 120 trains daily.

Trackside residents aren’t kind in their assessment of Yorba Linda politicians. They picket Yorba Linda council meetings, and they’ve hung banners on the makeshift walls that separate their properties from the tracks now, encouraging Yorba Linda residents to vote their council members out. At public hearings they play tapes of the trains screaming by--recorded from inside their living rooms.

Yorba Linda officials say the remedy is obvious: lower the wall and build a grassy, landscaped barrier on the other side so it doesn’t look so ugly. And one other thing: They want Anaheim to provide them a bike path that could cost nearly $2 million.

Anaheim residents note that sound consultants repeatedly concluded that the wall has to be higher than the trains or it will be useless. And they say it will be higher than 40 feet only in places where the ground dips on their side. Elsewhere, they say, the wall will not stand more than 25 feet above the tracks.

They also want to know what a bike path has to do with a sound wall.

“They are greedy,” said Friendly Village resident Kathy Wright.

Gullixson makes no apologies. “Those little ladies down there are rude and obnoxious, and we have let them know it,” he said. “This was not a project we wanted. If they were going to go forward with it, they should have considered the impacts it would have on our side.”