WFAA
Posted on August 15, 2012 at 10:52 PMCARROLLTON -- Life at home is rarely relaxing for Philip Allen. A constant, low roar from a nearby highway fills his home and his ears all day and throughout the night.
“It’s been a nightmare... We get maybe four hours of sleep a night,” he said. “If my wife and I weren’t so close, we’d probably be divorced by now because of all the noise.”
When he built his Carrollton home in 2004, State Highway 121 hadn’t yet been constructed. When crews started paving the fields behind his home, he and his neighbors assumed large sound walls would follow.
It took nearly three years for a sound wall to appear. Even then, neighbors complain it’s woefully inadequate.
The eight-foot wall stretches roughly 1,000 feet along the highway’s shoulder, only partially shielding their homes.
“We were here first,” said neighbor Chris Lawson. “We didn’t imagine it being this bad.”
The highway rumble so irritated Lawson, 49, he enlarged his fence last year and added a chorus of fountains to his backyard pool to keep out the racket.
“We did a lot of extra water effects to try and keep the noise down, but it’s not working very well,” he said.
For years, he and his neighbors have been lobbying authorities to expand the wall. They look with envy at their neighbors only a few hundred yards to the south, who enjoy a sound wall that at 15-feet, stands nearly twice as tall.
“Cars don’t get quieter when they get on our side, and noisier when they get on their side,” said Allen, 54. “It makes no sense. Sound doesn’t start and stop just like that.”
The Texas Department of Transportation originally built much of the highway before selling it for $3 billion to the North Texas Tollway Authority in 2007, which then renamed it the Sam Rayburn Tollway.
NTTA spokesperson Michael Rey said the sound walls were built after extensive studies and meet federally-approved guidelines.
“Noise walls, which were found to be ‘feasible’… and ‘reasonable’ (less than $25,000 per benefitted receiver), were built according to standard design practices,” Rey wrote in an e-mail to News 8.
He said adjacent property owners approved the eight-foot-tall wall, which the NTTA built in 2009 -- three years after a noise analysis called for it.
“It’s all right and proper,” Rey said. “It’s for a reason… it’s not a haphazard process.”
TxDOT built the 15-feet-high sound walls just to the south. It’s unclear why those homes have more protection.
Various agencies couldn’t pinpoint a specific reason, only saying noise studies called for a larger wall possibly because the homes are closer to the highway.
Allen doesn’t buy that excuse. While some homes indeed sit next to the highway, others in that sprawling subdivision stand just as far from traffic as his house, he claims.
“They have protection and we don’t have protection,” he said. “It’s just not right.”
He and his neighbors have signed petitions and urged city leaders for help. Previous Carrollton mayors sent letters on the neighbors’ behalf to the NTTA, but to no avail.
“They have been pretty firm,” said Carrollton City Manager Leonard Martin, of the NTTA.
He added the city can’t afford to expand the wall itself.
“We get a heck of a lot more requests for fixing things than there is ever money to fix,” he said. “The council’s priority has always been… they try to do projects that benefit large numbers of people.”
All the noise is enough to drive Allen away. If only, he said, he could convince a buyer to put up with the traffic.
“We’ve been kept hostage here because we can’t sell our house… they won’t buy it,” he said. “We can’t use our patio! We can’t use our backyard! There’s too much noise. We have to scream!” VIDEO
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