Homeowners seek leafy noise barrier

Cain barricaded his windows the day he was jolted out of bed by the whirring sound of saws cutting down melaleuca trees at the edge of his back yard. His bedroom and 16 other homes in his Waterford neighborhood in Ivanhoe are about 120 feet from Interstate 75. Constant highway traffic noise has disrupted the Davie neighborhood for more than a year.

But Florida Department of Transportation officials promise the aggravation will soon end. Crews will start building a grassy hill in neighborhood back yards Monday to shield the homes.

``They thought they were doing something for the ecology -- but it was at the sake of residents' lives. The DOT has basically left us I-75 as our back yard,'' said Scott Daniels, who watches traffic from the kitchen window of his home on Waterford Drive West.

Melaleucas are environmentally unfriendly trees in South Florida because their roots suck up vast amounts of water and crowd out native vegetation. Brought in from Australia in the early part of this century to help with Everglades drainage, melaleucas are now considered a Category 1 exotic pest plant by the state, which is trying to get rid of them.

Reico, a Miami-based construction company, was hired by the state transportation department in February 1995 to clear thousands of the pest trees in four areas along I-75. The $600,000 project included removing melaleucas and replacing them with native trees along a 2,000-foot-long buffer strip in Waterford, a median just north of Stirling Road and at highway interchanges at Pines Boulevard and Sheridan Street.

Residents in Waterford, a 184-home community off Volunteer Road, counted on the trees. Besides the 16 homes along Waterford Drive and Knighthurst Way that border I-75, another 30 can see the highway from their front yards.

Cleo Marsh, DOT's maintenance engineer for Broward, admits he had no idea there was a neighborhood behind the grove of tall trees. But even if he had known, he said he could not have stopped the project.

``The whole purpose of the project was to eliminate the melaleucas. . . . We didn't realize it would cause this much trouble to these people,'' he said.

Members of the Waterford Homeowners Association have met with DOT engineers five times in the past year to talk about building the grassy hill and planting three rows of areca palms to separate homes from the expressway, said Cain, the association's president.

``I just want them to finish what they started, clean up their mess. I want this over,'' he said.

In the fall, Marsh halted the project when he learned the DOT needed special permits from Broward's Department of Natural Resource Protection and the South Florida Water Management District to build the grassy hill in a wetland area.

Marsh said they now have the permits and the DOT is negotiating with landscapers to plant and care for the palm trees.

Transportation studies say highway sounds are constant -- with or without trees, Marsh said.

Daniels disagrees. ``We live here, and you don't have to be a rocket scientist to hear the difference. It is loud, and our lives are disturbed,'' he said.

Cutting down trees has disturbed another Southwest Broward community. Country Club Ranches residents have lived with the constant whir of traffic from the Homestead Extension of Florida's Turnpike for more than three years. A 1992 road improvement project cut down a grove of wax myrtle trees.

``It's loud, and we've had to learn to live with it,'' said Karen Dillman, secretary of Country Club Ranches Homeowners Association. ``I'd love if they plant something here that's naturally low maintenance and ecologically friendly.''

But the DOT has no such plans for the 265-ranch community.

Daniels sympathizes. Fighting the DOT bureaucracy is tiring, he said.

``It's amazing to think how much money has been wasted on this project and the one in Country Club Ranches, and it's still not over,'' Daniels said. ``It's egg on the taxpayers' face. We've empowered DOT without any accountability.''