Sound Barriers

Crum Lynne residents will be looking at some color and texture samples soon for a long-awaited neighborhood construction project. Two 1,200-foot-long sound barriers are scheduled to be erected next spring along I-95 after a 13-year lobbying effort by residents of the tiny community. Approval was granted in January 1989, according to Ridley Township manager Anne Howanski. Color and texture samples of the types of sound barriers were delivered by the Pennsylvania Department of Transportation last week and will be made available for residents to choose from, Commissioner Chick Peticca announced at the commissioners' meeting Wednesday night.

For more than 10 years, at countless meetings, Bill Simpkin has lobbied PennDot and other government officials and agencies to put sound barriers along the strip of Interstate 95 that runs past his neighborhood and roars with traffic 24 hours a day. Now, Simpkin and some of his neighbors, whose voices seem to rise to a scream whenever they discuss the sound barriers, say they are ready to close I-95 to get action. "I'm the one who said we should stop all of the traffic," Simpkin said as afternoon commuters whizzed by his neighborhood, 100 yards away.

The shoulder of I-95 north through the marsh in Tinicum Township was abuzz Thursday night with about 35 township residents rallying with signs and American flags for the construction of sound barriers along that stretch of highway. A rush of cars and trucks cruised by, horns honking as residents held signs that read: "Welcome to Tinicum, the noisiest town in Delaware County. To Gov. Casey and PennDot: We need sound barriers now. " Ed Jurewicz, a Tinicum resident who made the signs, said he was disappointed in the local politicians.

The Pennsylvania Department of Transportation yesterday announced a $5 million project to construct sound barriers along two sections of the Route 309 Expressway. The 8- to 16-foot-high noise barriers will be placed along the south side of the highway between Paper Mill and Church Roads in Springfield and from just north of Butler Pike to just south of Norristown Road in Lower Gwynedd and Upper Dublin Townships. The walls, funded by $4 million in federal funds and $1 million from the state, will be erected in 2002 and 2003 during the planned $160 million reconstruction of the 10-mile expressway, said Andrew Warren, PennDot district administrator.

The township Board of Supervisors is not about to change its long-held stance on the Route 202 bypass proposal. It supports it. It has said it supports it. It has been saying so since 1987. That does not mean three hours of appeals from nearly 200 residents fell on deaf ears last week. Many of the concerns of those crowded into last Tuesday's special supervisors' meeting may be translated into a formal township resolution introduced here last night. The supervisors say they still strongly support the bypass - a 13.8-mile highway that the Pennsylvania Department of Transportation says would alleviate congestion on Route 202. Taking a cue from the residents at last week's meeting, however, board Chairman John T. Carson introduced a resolution that would urge PennDot to install sound barriers along the highway.

PennDot engineers preparing final design plans for a wider Route 202 between the Exton Bypass and North Valley Road have crucial decisions to make in the next six months. They will have to determine which areas will get sound barriers and which will have to coexist with the around-the-clock din of traffic. The Pennsylvania Department of Transportation has identified a dozen areas along the 6.3-mile stretch as eligible, but township officials and residents want more. At a community meeting tomorrow at Great Valley Middle School, highway officials will discuss how decisions about sound barriers are made.

The Lower Merion school board has hired an architect to redesign Merion School, renovated for open classrooms in 1970, as a more traditional school. The board hired Dagit-Saylor Architects of Philadelphia on Monday night to conduct a study of the school on Bowman Avenue. The construction of walls and sound barriers will be considered. The firm also will examine how to improve heating and ventilation in the building. The study is expected to cost up to $10,000. "We have been moving away from the open-school concept in the last five to six years," said Merion principal Marvin Gold.

Construction of the Blue Route at the intersection of Eagle and Springfield Roads in Springfield has created problems for educators next door at Cardinal O'Hara High School. To mitigate problems with noise and air pollution, air conditioning and sound barriers have been installed at the school. And to alleviate traffic concerns, temporary roadways have been built. "The windows of the side of the building where construction is taking place have been sealed off and air conditioning installed to minimize the air and noise pollution to our students and faculty," said Robert Palestini, superintendent of schools for the Philadelphia Archdiocese.

Edith Fisher has lived in her Fishtown home for 11 years. And "lived" may be a stretch. "Dirt, noise, my house shakes, the windows rattle, the walls vibrate," she said from her house on Palmer Street near Delaware Avenue. "If I'm sitting on the couch in the sitting room, and the trucks go by, the walls vibrate. They rattle. It's so bad. " The problem Edith and her firefighter husband, Bob, have looms large above them: Interstate 95. Homeowners from Northern Liberties to Wissinoming had all been promised barrier insulation and more in a $2 billion so-called intermodal mobility project.

Leo Rosenberg loves Sunday mornings. On Sunday mornings, he likes to take his coffee to the patio and listen to the silence. Because on Monday mornings - around 4 a.m., to be exact - the Cherry Hill resident will awaken to the drone of high-speed trucks and semi- trailers on Interstate 295, just behind his home in Barclay Farms. It's been that way for eight years, ever since Rosenberg moved to what he thought was a peaceful suburban community. Although his wife, Cheryl, seems to have adjusted to it and his three teenagers just ignore it, Rosenberg said, "I've never gotten used to it. . . . "The noise is intense," said Rosenberg, a former lieutenant colonel in the Army and associate vice president at Cooper Hospital/University Medical Center in Camden.

   ROSWELL, N.M. - In a giant leap from more than 24 miles up, a daredevil skydiver shattered the sound barrier Sunday while making the highest jump ever - a tumbling, death-defying plunge from a balloon to a safe landing in the New Mexico desert. Felix Baumgartner hit Mach 1.24, or 833.9 mph, according to preliminary data, and became the first man to reach supersonic speed without traveling in a jet or a spacecraft after hopping out of a capsule that had reached an altitude of 128,100 feet above Earth.

OK, this is really getting ridiculous. When last we polished off a plate of oxtails at the Jamaican Jerk Hut, the venerable Caribbean eatery at 15th and South, owner Lisa Wilson was still waging a David-and-Goliath battle with residents of Symphony House, a 32-story luxury condominium complex at Broad and Spruce. Never mind that the Zoning Board of Adjustment and Common Pleas Court had both ruled in the Jerk Hut's favor: Namely, that Wilson could play live reggae music for her customers on the lot next to the restaurant on weekends in spring and summer.

Celine Dreher cannot hear you, but sometimes she can hear Sarah, a creation of her malfunctioning brain who "speaks" to her from inside her head. This medical double whammy - deafness and schizophrenia - has left Dreher, 44, feeling doubly isolated for much of her life. She was the only deaf person in her group home, the only deaf person at the psychiatric hospital. "I felt like there was no communication," she said through a sign-language interpreter. She sometimes had to write notes to fellow patients and staff.

About 25 feet separate Jim Simpson's backyard from the roar of the turnpike A member of the Great Valley Association civic group, Simpson often walks out to his yard, holding a small sound meter. He measures the noise from tires and turbulence coming to an inescapable conclusion: "The turnpike makes a wonderful area less livable," said Simpson, 63, who moved to the Glenhardie area 22 years ago. As the Pennsylvania Turnpike Commission plans an expansion of the turnpike from four to six lanes between the Valley Forge and Downingtown interchanges, the association wants sound walls erected along the 6.2 miles cutting through Tredyffrin.

Commercial development and vanishing trees When I moved to Upper Merion Township 14 years ago, our community abounded with trees. We have a lot fewer now, and if our Board of Supervisors doesn't do something about it, we will soon have fewer still. The issue now is the removal of four acres of mature forest adjacent to a residential neighborhood, to be replaced with parking for more than 200 cars and a 72,000-square-foot commercial sports-development complex. All of this is just a seven iron from the Valley Forge Golf Course, which the State Supreme Court recently ruled could be developed into another King of Prussia mall.

The dirt started to arrive in the fall of 2000, not long after we moved into our new house in East Camden. Our neighborhood is quiet and clean, and our neighbors are nice. I would say our neighborhood is middle-class. There are a few boarded-up houses, but most of the houses are in pretty good shape. My neighbors and I keep up our houses nicely. In our house it's me; my wife, Yvonne; my middle daughter; her two children; and my youngest son. We have a single house with three bedrooms and a two-car garage.

All the people who live quieter lives behind the sound barriers of the Blue Route, the Pennsylvania Turnpike and, coming soon, a wider stretch of Route 202 have one man in particular to thank. Or, more precisely, one man and one machine. He's William Marion, 59, a friendly sort with gray hair escaping from under his hard hat and a blond mustache curling past his smile. The guys on the job call him "Uncle Buddy. " "She" - the machine is a female, Marion says - is a caisson drill, and she doesn't quite have Marion's equanimity.

Last year, Willemara Thompson received a grade report full of D's and F's and a dire prediction that she just wasn't college material. Thompson wasn't a poor student. She simply couldn't hear what her professors were saying. Now, the human-services major from Pennsgrove sails through Camden County College with A's and B's, thanks to new technology that allows students with hearing loss to function fully in conventional classrooms. "I used to fail tests because a teacher would turn around and say something important with his back to me, so I missed it," said Thompson, who uses the technology in each of her four classes this semester.