Noise From Bakery Trucks Irks Neighborhood : Homeowners: Residents want Los Angeles to enforce an ordinance that limits truck traffic on residential streets.

Residents of a North Hollywood housing tract are feeling sandwiched in by delivery trucks that use neighborhood streets to get to a nearby bakery. But the bakery says that reducing the number of trips through the neighborhood would eat into its profits, and it needs the dough.

In this tale of yeast meets west--west Toluca Lake, that is--residents have banded together in an effort to reduce what they say is intolerable truck noise from the Old Country Bakery in the 5300 block of Biloxi Avenue.

The bakery’s tractor-trailer trucks pass through the five-block neighborhood on the western border of Toluca Lake a dozen times daily, said Jerry Smith, a bakery spokesman. Trucks carrying grain and other products also make occasional deliveries, he said.

“We’ve had to patch cracks in the plaster from the truck vibrations over the years,” said Katherine Scovone, a 40-year resident.

“The first time I heard one go by in the middle of the night I thought it was an earthquake,” said Carol Wanzek, who moved to the area about 1 1/2 years ago.

Scovone and Wanzek are two of about 100 members of the Toluca Terrace Homeowners Assn. who signed petitions asking City Councilman John Ferraro to enforce a city ordinance prohibiting truck traffic on residential streets between 10 p.m. and 6:30 a.m. on weekdays, between 10 p.m. and 7:30 a.m. on Saturdays, and eliminating it entirely on Sundays.

But Smith said the bakery--which is owned by a conglomerate of large, national food-processing firms--must operate the trucks around the clock.

“It’s not like we’re manufacturing computer chips or something--we make a perishable product,” Smith said. “If we can’t use the streets, we won’t be able to get the product out the same way as we do now.”

Smith said the bakery, which has been operating at the same location for 34 years, has enjoyed harmonious relations with neighbors until recently. But the neighbors, led by resident Theresa Karam, say they were just being tossed crumbs twice a year when the bakery gave out free bread. They said they have long been plagued by such problems as flour dust clogging the filters and pumps of their swimming pools and claim that truck traffic has worsened over the years as the bakery grew from a mom-and-pop operation into a factory with more than 10 grain silos.

“We’re the new blood, the generation that is going to change things around here,” said Karam, a psychologist who has lived in the neighborhood for three years.

“I wasn’t even aware they were here at first until I smelled bread,” said Beth Robbins, a saleswoman who has lived in the area for seven years. “But recently, they’ve grown and I’m happy for them, but the trucks aren’t little putt-putts anymore and it’s just horrible.”

City officials were prepared to begin enforcing the ordinance restricting truck traffic this month when attorneys for the bakery pointed out that traffic signs stating the law must be posted first, said John Haggerty, an assistant city attorney. The icing on the cake for the residents is that the signs could take several months to manufacture, said Al Albaisa, a city transportation engineer.

Ferraro will ask the city’s Department of Transportation to rush production of the signs, said Mary Presby, one of the councilman’s field deputies. But the ordinance will not entirely solve the noise problem in the neighborhood because the trucking restrictions apply only to Biloxi Avenue, not to Clybourn Avenue, which is designated as a secondary highway.

In addition, a proposal by residents to require the trucks to use Chandler Boulevard instead of going through the neighborhood is unworkable because the nearby city of Burbank prohibits truck traffic entirely on that section of Chandler, said Howard Jones, a Burbank traffic engineer. “It’s almost like the way to solve this is to have all the deliveries from the air,” Presby said. “But, of course, that would create noise problems too.”

Not everyone in the neighborhood feels crusty toward the bakery.

“I guess the trucks go by, but I’ve never heard one yet,” said Dede Walser, who has lived along the truck route for 30 years.