WOODLAND HILLS RESIDENTS WAITING TOO LONG; NEIGHBORS SHOUT FOR SOUND WALL.

Byline: Dennis McCarthy 

They've got the patience of saints, these people living over on the south side of Clark Street.

For the past six years, this group of Woodland Hills homeowners, living between Winnetka and De Soto avenues, has been waiting for the state to come back and finish putting up sound walls high enough to block out some of the deafening Ventura Freeway noise that makes their back yards sound like the pit at the Indianapolis 500.

The California Department of Transportation started the job, but the contractors it hired never got around to getting the walls high enough to even block out the sight of cars driving by on the freeway, let alone block out any of the deafening noise.

``The only answers we've ever gotten when we'd complain was that the state was broke, and there was no money left to finish our sound walls,'' Ray Thompson shouted Wednesday, as we stood in his back yard talking.

We were standing all of about two feet apart. The only time he goes out in his back yard is to cut the grass, Thompson says. The freeway noise is that bad.

It wasn't always this way, he and his neighbors, Jorgen Munck and Kay Vandenbosch, say. There used to be big trees and foliage that cut down a lot of the noise, but those were taken out so the state could come in and build sound walls that weren't high enough to do any good.

To be effective, sound walls should have to be at least 18 feet above the level of the freeway. In Thompson's back yard, the pilings for the wooden plank walls were set in a gully at the rear of his yard, and reach up about 12 feet - not even to the level of the cars whizzing by on the freeway.

``We complained regularly for a few years, but everybody we talked to in the Department of Transportation said there was nothing they could do, the money wasn't there,'' said Ray's wife, Barbara.

``Pretty soon, the people I'd been talking to either retired or moved on, and I stopped calling to complain,'' she said. ``Basically, we had been forgotten.''

What finally broke the patience of these saints living over on Clark Street was a story in Monday's Daily News about how the state Transportation Commission had informally agreed to fund $125 million worth of sound walls statewide, with $52.5 million of that being allocated for freeways in the San Fernando Valley.

Before the saints started popping champagne corks and celebrating, they checked the priority list of Valley areas slated for sound walls just to make sure their little stretch of freeway heaven was on it.

It wasn't. The saints said the hell with it, and got mad.

Jamal Jamal, a senior engineer in the Los Angeles office of the state Department of Transportation, and the man in charge of the priority list of who gets a sound wall in L.A. County, pleaded ignorance to the plight of the Clark Street saints.

In all fairness, Jamal Jamal is the third guy to hold this job in the past six years. The other two retired. Jamal promised Wednesday to find out how Clark Street seems to have fallen through the sound-wall cracks.

``We usually give priority to people who have no sound walls over people who already have existing walls, but I'll assign someone to it right away, and find out what's going on,'' Jamal said.

When I called Jorgen Munck on Wednesday afternoon to tell him the good news, that Jamal Jamal was on the case, Jorgen was out in his back yard doing some gardening.

His wife, Sally, stood at the sliding glass door, yelling to her husband who was kneeling about 20 feet away.

He couldn't hear a word.

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PHOTO Barbara and Ray Thompson stand in their back yard, inundated by noise from the nearby Ventura Freeway.

Bob Halvorsen/Daily News